The Choiring Of The Trees Part 10

Viridis made a sort of laugh and stopped drawing. She looked Sull in the eye. "Then maybe you'll explain why you shot Waymon Chism in the back."

All of the men tried to speak at once, but the sheriff's voice was loudest: "G.o.ddammit, it was self dee-fense!"

Viridis ignored him and continued looking Sull in the eye. "Waymon Chism was shot in the back," she repeated herself, "by the same pistol that fired four shots at me in the Buckhorn Hotel."

"It was pervoked," the sheriff said lamely. "I mean, naw, you didn't pervoke him, and thar weren't no excuse for thet Buckhorn misbehavior, but Waymon Chism sh.o.r.e enough incited and aggervated and brung it on hisself."

Viridis turned and looked coldly at the sheriff, but she pointed her finger at Sull. "Why isn't this low-life coward in jail?" she demanded.

"Ma'am!" said the sheriff. "Watch who yo're talkin about! He's the county jedge! We aint about to put him in no jail!"

Sull said, "Duster, why don't we put her in jail like we was fixin to?"

"Now, now, boys," Judge Villines said. He was saying "boys" the same way everybody does in this part of the country, meaning any male even eighty or ninety, but I couldn't help feeling these "boys" weren't any older than me; they certainly weren't behaving any better than rowdy children. "Let's us not be rude to a representative of the Arkansas Gazette. Don't we want to show ourself in the best light and present a favorable front to the rest of the world? We caint go around arrestin gentlemen and ladies of the public press."

Sheriff Snow said, "We jist come over yere to git Rindy Whitter fer a little talk, Jedge. That's all we come over fer, but then this yere lady started makin trouble."

Judge Villines asked Viridis, "Couldn't these men simply have a few words with little Miss Whitter here, ma'am?"

"Not him." Viridis pointed at Sull again.

"Why, how come, ma'am? He's got a personal interest in this matter too."

"He certainly does!" Viridis said. I had the feeling she was losing her temper, and then, sure enough, she lost it. "He viciously tricked Dorinda Whitter into submitting herself to a s.e.xual a.s.sault which he performed upon her himself, and he inflicted unspeakable pain upon her, and then forced her into blaming innocent Nail Chism for what he had done!" Not a word or utterance of reply was made to these words by anybody, not by the accused, not by the accused's confederates. The only sound to break the silence, finally, was a small, stifled sob from Rindy.

At last Judge Villines spoke up. "That's a very serious charge, ma'am, and it's totally unsubstantiated, and it's pint-blank hearsay, and I would be very careful before I'd go around sayin things like that."

"It will be said in the pages of the Arkansas Gazette as soon as I get back to Little Rock."

"Duster, you'd better th'ow her in jail!" Sull said. "It's too late to shut up Rindy. We better jist th'ow this b.i.t.c.h in jail and keep 'er thar!"

Judge Villines, such a mild man, lost his temper then. "Shut yore fool mouth, Sull! Aint you done made enough trouble already? Jist shut up, afore ye go and make it worse!"

"Yeah," said Sheriff Duster Snow. "Yeah, Sull, you heared the jedge. Let's us jist simmer down and shush it up."

There was a shuffling of feet as the men waited to see which of them would make the first move to leave. The old woman got the last word: "It will be so pleasant when all of you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds have removed yourselves from my porch."

All the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds got off the porch.

Viridis and Rindy left Stay More early the next morning. I was there to see them off. I hated it. My best friend, off and on, terribly off for the longest time but now back on again, going away to the big city, where I'd love to go someday, any day. We cried. "On't ye come wif me?" Rindy said. "Caint," I said. "Ess ast Miss Monday kin ye," she suggested. "No, there's not no room no way," I said. And there wasn't, atop that poor mare, Rosabone, who'd be loaded down a-carrying the two of them. Much, much later, when I learned all about the trip, I knew they had dismounted from Rosabone on the hills and ridden her only downhill and on the level places, and still she was a brave old mare to take them both plumb to Clarksville. Rindy had on a pair of one of her brothers' pants so she could ride astraddle behind Viridis, and Viridis had put back on those jodhpurs that she'd never had a chance to let anyone see her wearing except us.

Viridis and the old woman had a talk while Rindy and I were saying our good-byes. After I had said all I could to tell Rindy I hoped she would have a good time in Little Rock and how much I admired her and all, there was nothing more to say, so I listened to Viridis and the old woman. The old woman said she was sorry that Viridis had not received a more favorable impression of Stay More. Viridis a.s.sured her that the people of Stay More were just fine. The old woman said she hoped Viridis would want to come back. Viridis said there was no doubt whatsoever that she would be coming back. She wanted to come back in the spring, and in the summer, when all the shades of green would be in their glory and she could paint them. The old woman said that any time Viridis wanted to come back she would be very welcome to stay here at this house.

Then Viridis turned to say good-bye to me. She shook my hand. I guess tears were running down my face. And I didn't cry easy. "Latha, I'll miss you," she said, and I knew she wasn't just being polite. "You were a wonderful help to me, and I'll never forget it. You be good to yourself, and I'll see you again in the spring."

"Miss Monday-" I tried to say, choked.

"Oh, please just call me Viridis, or Very," she said.

"Very...Viridis..." I tried, but it didn't sound natural or mannerly. "You are the nicest lady I've ever known."

On.

One minute he is looking at the best girl on this earth, the next minute he is face to face with the worst one. Nail could not look at her. He looked at the guard for help, or some sign of fellow-feeling, but the guard, a white trusty called Bird, just looked bored and stupid, and had no idea that Nail's visitor was none other than the selfsame little trollop whose lies had put Nail in this h.e.l.l.

She wasn't looking at him either. She had given him just a glance and then was watching the door behind him as if she were still waiting to see the person she was expecting to come in through that door. She didn't even know it was him. She don't even recognize what she's done to me, he realized. She just stood there uncertain and scared-looking, waiting for somebody who looked like what she remembered Nail Chism looked like, but that guy never showed up, so after a while her eyes came to rest on him long and careful, and then she just said one word, in hardly a whisper: "Nail?" He didn't nod his head or say anything to her. But she finally must have got it through her silly head that it was indeed him, because the next thing she did was to fall down on her knees and clasp her hands together as if she were praying to him. "Oh, Nail!" she wailed, the way some ladies at a revival holler, "Oh, G.o.d!"

He didn't say a word. He just looked down at her there on her knees. Somebody had spent some more money on some more clothes for her. She wasn't wearing that white thing she'd worn at the trial, that had made her look like her own idea of an angel. Now she had on a real nice wool coat, dark-green, and even a little hat on her head like she would wear to Sunday school, and a little purse in her hand, and fancy shoes that went up her legs. She even looked older than what she had been. Well, maybe she had done turned fourteen since that summer that seemed so many years ago. Nail realized that Viridis had brought her here, and that she had put her name on that pet.i.tion, which meant that she was ready to admit that she had wrongly accused him.

"Nail, oh Nail, Nail, Nail," she said. "Please fergive me. Say you'll fergive me, please please oh please." The tears were running down her face and messing up the powder and rouge that somebody had put on her face.

He honestly did not know what to say, so he didn't say anything. Bird threw him a curious look as if he'd done something awful to the poor girl to make her get down on her knees and bawl her eyes out like that. He wanted to say to Bird, This here little old girl is the reason I'm in The Walls-now watch and hear her tell me she's sorry she done it. But he honestly did not know what to say.

"Oh, what have I done to you?" she squalled. And because he wasn't making any response to any of her words, she seemed to give up trying to talk to him and started in to talking to herself: "Oh, see what ye've done to him, you bad bad girl! Oh, look at his pore haid! You ort to be kilt yoreself, you big eejit! You ort to jist trade places with him!"

She kept on babbling to herself like that until finally Nail said, "Git up, Rindy." The sound of his voice at last seemed to jolt her back to the real world, and she looked at him as if he'd said something wonderful and nice to her, and she got one of those fancy shoes up under her and began to rise up.

She stood up, although she didn't stand straight. She was hunched in the back like she didn't have any right to hold her head up anymore. She stood bent over like that and said, "I done tole Very everthing the way it really was, that it was Sull and not you who done it."

"What did Sull do?" he asked.

"Ever last thing I tole in court that you had done, jist lak I tole it, on'y hit was him, not you."

"But you let him," Nail said.

She shook her head. "Naw. He tuck me. He tole me to play-like you was him, so's I'd know how it felt."

Nail slammed his hand against the screen separating them, as if he could knock it down. "The son of a b.i.t.c.h!" he said.

Bird waved his shotgun barrel. "Hey, watch it there, big fella."

Nail turned his back to Bird and Rindy so they could not see his anger. He walked toward the door leading out of the visit room but, on reaching it, turned and walked back to the screen, and said to her, "Did he hurt you?"

"Uh-huh, a lot," she said. "A whole lot."

"Then how come ye to...how could ye...Rindy, for G.o.dsakes, why did ye do a favor for him?"

She hung her head. "They paid me," she said.

"They?" he said. "They who?"

"The sherf and them," she said.

"How much?"

"They's sposed to of paid me thirty dollars but they never guv me but ten, and they said they'd give me the rest when you got...when they kilt ye in that burnin-cheer...but I said I didn't want 'em to do that. Nail, I believed to my soul that the onliest thing they'd ever do to ye was to make ye stop botherin 'em the way ye was, with the federal law and all. I had no idee atall they'd th'ow ye in prison, let alone try to put ye in the burnin-cheer."

"You sat there in that courtroom," he reminded her, "and you heared ole Link Villines sentence me to death."

"When he said that, I got the all-overs," she said. "I had the all-overs so bad I couldn't even think straight, let alone say nothin."

"You could've said somethin afore now."

"Sull would've kilt me," she said. "He tried. He tried to kill Very too."

"What?"

She used up a good chunk of her fifteen minutes to tell him the story of how Viridis had spent the night in the Buckhorn Hotel at Jasper when she was trying to find all the jurymen to sign her "position," and how Sull had come in the middle of the night to the Buckhorn and confronted her and fired at her through the door, and then how Viridis had kept Sull and the sheriff and them from getting to Rindy that morning the men of Stay More were about to invade Jasper. Rindy talked so fast Nail couldn't follow her and get it all straight. Now Rindy was going on about how Sull had tried to catch them as they were leaving Newton County and had followed them in his car up around Loafer's Glory, and they had had to ride Very's mare off into the woods to get away from him, and he had abandoned his car and come on foot after them and got close enough at one point to shoot up all the ammunition that his automatic would hold, and Very had fired back at him with a six-shooter she had, and maybe hit him, they couldn't tell, but they had got away from him, deeper into the woods, and lost, and when they got back on the main road to Clarksville they never saw any more of him.

Then she was silent. "Go on with yore knittin," he told her.

"That's all," she said. "That was day afore yestiddy. Then we come on down yere to Little Rock. Aint it a big place? Aint this town a sight on airth?"

"I don't rightly know," he admitted. "I aint seen much of it."

"You ort to see this yere big house where Very lives at," she said, and held her hands high over her head. "It's the beatenest house ever I seed. That's whar I'm a-stayin. Today we're gonna go out to the state capitol buildin and see the governor! We're gonna give that governor Very's position with all them names on it!" Rindy began to smile for the first time. "I'm gonna stand up thar in front of the governor and swaller my teeth and tell 'im it was all a big mistake. Then you jist wait and see if you aint out of yere in two shakes of a dead lamb's tail, I bet ye!"

"I hope that governor believes ye," he said.

"Oh, Very says he's got to believe me! I'm gonna tell him the truth, jist edzackly lak it was."

For the first time he was able to soften his tone. "That's fine spoke. I 'preciate that, Rindy. I sh.o.r.e do."

"And when you git out and come back up home, I hope ye won't be mad at me no more. I'll do anything you want me to do iffen ye'll fergive me."

"All I want ye to do is stay away from that Sull. He aint a bit o' good fer ye."

"Don't I know it? I sh.o.r.e learnt my lesson. He's the meanest feller on this airth. What he done to Waymon-" Rindy put both hands over her mouth.

Nail put both hands on the screen, in defiance of Bird. "Yeah? What was you about to say?"

"I aint sposed to mention Waymon."

"Rindy. Look at me. What did Sull do to Waymon? Tell me."

She whispered, "He shot him in the back."

"Naw! When was this? He aint dead, is he?"

Bird said, "Big boy, take your hands off that screen. Your time is up anyhow. Better get on back to your roost. Here comes Short Leg."

"Listen," Nail said to Bird and raised his manacled wrists to gesture toward the anteroom, "could you get that lady to come back in here for just a second? I got to ast her something."

"Sorry. You caint chaw your tobacco twice. Here's Short Leg."

"Rindy! Waymon's not kilt, is he? Don't tell me he's kilt!"

"No, Nail, he's still alive," she said.

"G.o.ddammit! Jist let me git out of here!" Short Leg took his arm and led him toward the door. "Rindy, you make that governor let me out of here!" he called to her from the door.

"I will," she said.

Off.

For the longest time he heard nothing from the outside world. He became painfully aware of this fact of prison life: if you expect nothing, you'll be satisfied, but if you're waiting for something, even death, time will drag, each day will last a week, and if you take a minute to wonder when you're going to get what you're expecting, the minute will become an hour.

Could it be possible, as his calendar told him, that here it was March already and that weeks had gone by since Viridis and Rindy had made their visits to him and to the governor? Or had he just imagined both of those females and their visits? No, he had at least some proof of it, in the form of the sketchbook that Timbo Red was now filling up with drawings: Viridis had brought it for him, not exactly smuggling it in, as he had suggested, but openly giving it to Mr. Burdell and telling him that it was a gift from the employees of the Arkansas Gazette, for Timbo Red, a talented young artist, and Burdell had let the boy have it, and Timbo Red was beside himself with joy. Nail would have been very happy for the kid too, except that it was really hard to be happy about somebody else's good fortune when your own luck was running so bad. He couldn't understand it. He spent all his time watching for the appearance of Farrell Cobb and an expected letter from Viridis. After a few weeks he even got up his nerve and asked the warden, "Mr. Burdell, sir, you aint happen to have heard anything about maybe Mr. Cobb is sick or anything like that?" and Mr. Burdell had just looked at him and grinned and shrugged his shoulders.

It was enough to drive a fellow crazy, if he wasn't already. Nail had two things that kept him from going over the brink: his tree charm, which he would finger in moments of intense anxiety, and the one December letter from Viridis, by now reduced almost to shreds; but no matter if it did eventually disintegrate, he knew it by heart. He almost knew by heart what the next letter would say, if it ever came-or at least what he would want it to say, and exactly how he would want her to say it: that she was setting him free.

In his restlessness he began to get the first exercise he'd had since they threw him in The Walls. He began to pace. Sometimes he couldn't just lie on his bed or sit on the edge of it talking to Timbo Red and watching him fill up his sketchbook. Often it was hard to watch Timbo Red's sketches, because the boy began to draw increasingly from his memory of the scenes of his youth that were pleasant: the creeks and forests and pastures of Stone County-woodland scenes and meadow scenes and deer at gloaming, tranquil pools and soaring crags and sunsets on the ridges. The kid sure could draw. You could almost be there, the scenes were so real, but they only made Nail's eagerness to get home even worse, and after watching Timbo Red draw for a little while, he had to get up and start walking. He walked up and down the rows of the bunks, the whole length of the barracks, several times and back. In the beginning of his hikes he made the mistake of wandering into the rows of the bunks where the blacks lived, and they stopped what they were doing or saying and watched him pa.s.s, and one of them reached out and stopped him and said, "Wat baw, you know way you is at?" and he confessed, "I reckon I don't," and got himself out of that neighborhood and back among the whites, who paid him no more notice than to the several other compulsive ambulators.

All of this walking increased his appet.i.te, and he began to do what Viridis had advised him: eat whatever they gave him. He ate whatever was on his plate and watched for chances to filch crumbs of cornbread from anybody else's plate. He even regained a couple of pounds, at the risk of getting caught violating a main rule: don't ever eat anybody else's food. He began to sit next to men whose appet.i.tes he knew were poor: the old, the sick, the apathetic. He became adept at sliding his hand beneath the edge of the table and up over the edge to s.n.a.t.c.h any morsel remaining.

He walked and he ate and he regained some of his health. Then Fat Gabe caught him stealing food. Not Fat Gabe himself but one of the black trusties whose job it was to stool to him. But instead of giving Nail a dose of the strap, Fat Gabe did a strange thing: at the next breakfast he brought him an egg, the first egg Nail had seen since he'd been in The Walls, the first protein since Christmas. It was hard-boiled, not pan-fried the way his mother used to fix him a half dozen of each morning, but it was a genuine egg. He knew better than to ask any questions of Fat Gabe, so he didn't ask him what it was for, or what he had done to deserve it. He just ate it. At dinner Fat Gabe brought him an extra plate of cornbread and beef fat. He ate it. And at supper Fat Gabe did the same, or, rather, he began to have the trusty who waited on the table make sure that Nail got a second helping. This continued daily.

Nail wondered if Fat Gabe was getting soft. Or religious. Or just tired of being mean and evil. But no, if anything, Fat Gabe was growing even more vicious in his treatment of other men: he now had twenty-one notches on his belt, and he seemed to be getting so much exercise and muscular development from his daily floggings that he could administer up to forty lashes before beginning to tire. The two trusties who were required to sit on the victim's head and feet and hold him down often were exhausted from their efforts before Fat Gabe began to tire. And Fat Gabe was always seeking to refine the severity of his methods: he now had a long leather strap that had bra.s.s brads embedded in the tip to impart an extra fillip of pain and laceration. Then Fat Gabe discovered that boring a number of penny-sized round holes in the strap would not only reduce air resistance and make the strap faster and harder but also leave blisters and welts. No, Fat Gabe was becoming anything but soft. As an ultimate infliction of pain, certain to fill the barracks with endless screams, he sponged salt water into the wounds. Eventually Doc G.o.de was required by Fat Gabe to sit and take the victim's pulse and keep the torturer informed of the floggee's heart rate, in order to determine the maximum number of lashes-thirty-five or forty-that could be tolerated in one day. After forty lashes drenched with salt water, most men faced the prospect of three weeks upstairs in the flyspeck room recuperating or dying under Doc G.o.de's supervision. Every week Fat Gabe put another notch on his belt.

Nail considered the possibility that Fat Gabe was giving him extra food only because he had received orders from above-perhaps the governor himself had been influenced by Viridis (and Rindy too). But Nail usually ate his extra ration without reflecting on it: you don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Most of the other men did not resent Nail for his extra food. As one of them put it, "A double helping of s.h.i.t is still s.h.i.t." But a few, especially those who had been sent out of The Walls all day to do hard work at the lumberyard or the brick kiln or on the railroad and had ravenous appet.i.tes when they returned, begrudged Nail his double servings of food because he was never even sent out of The Walls to work. One of these observed, at the table in the hearing of anybody watching Nail start on his second plate, including Fat Gabe's stoolie, "Nails is just gettin fattened up for the slaughter." And the men nodded their heads and chuckled or grinned.

Timbo Red too began to suspect that Fat Gabe was giving Nail extra food only because "he's tryin to git ye back in shape so's he kin destroy ye." Nail considered this and remembered the threat that Fat Gabe had made to him before Christmas: "I'm gonna save ya till you're strong enough to 'preciate what I'm gonna do to you." It had been noticed that Fat Gabe never administered the strap or any of his other tortures to ailing men, weak men, men too frail to fight back. He seemed to have a fondness for flogging men who were much stronger than he himself could ever aspire to be. Nail noticed that the most recent deaths from the bra.s.s-bradded lash and brine-soaked sponge had been men who were notably muscular, hale, and, at least until their punishment, indomitable. Nail decided he had better not give the appearance of becoming too healthy.

More men tried to escape. The coming of springtime always makes prisoners want to get out, to go home and do their plowing and planting, or at least to get out where they can watch the world wake up to the new season. The rising of the sap probably accounted as well for Fat Gabe's increased energy, and the severity of his scourge was another motive for attempts at escape. In the few years since the old state penitentiary had been torn down to give its hill to the new state capitol, and the high, thick barrier of brick on a hill outside of town had been stacked into the rectangle called The Walls, there had been only two or three successful escapes, and of those, only one was still at large, a murderer named McCabe, whose method of escape was kept a secret from both the public and the prison population. Every man inside wanted to become the second at-large escapee. They schemed and plotted, and conjectured about McCabe's possible modus operandi, and they tried to acquire lengths of rope, or to fashion rope out of stripped bedclothes, or to make primitive ladders. The few who managed to scale the wall without getting shot by the trusties manning the four towers at the corners of the The Walls made it as far as the swampy thickets to the south, where, within a few hours at most, bloodhounds tracked and caught them. A shed right behind Warden Burdell's house had six bloodhounds penned up and ready to go. According to rumor, the one man who had eluded the bloodhounds had disguised his scent by smearing mustard oil on his feet. But none of the rumors told how he had acquired the mustard oil in the first place.

Strong men who attempted escape that month of March were the especial targets of Fat Gabe's flagellations. He did not need to fabricate an excuse to whip them; attempted escape was a felony, and, to discourage others from making the attempt, the flogging was made as visible and audible as possible: everybody had to gather in a thick circle around the inverted wheelbarrow over which the body of the man would be held by three trusties while Doc G.o.de took the man's pulse and a fifth trusty sponged salt water into the wounds that Fat Gabe steadily inflicted, to a total of one hundred and sixty, if the victim could bear the maximum of forty per day and live through four days of it. No inmate forced to stand and watch that performance through four days would give a lot of thought to attempting escape himself, but it was still an option preferable to death in the flyspeck room.

Fat Gabe not only kept feeding Nail all he could eat, he also began to let him outside the building. The warm weather made it necessary to open the windows and get as much air as possible into the barracks, and to get as many men as possible out into the Yard. The Yard was only a yard: merely all of the empty s.p.a.ce between the brick buildings and the brick walls, a few acres of what had once been gra.s.s but was now mostly mud and sand, with just a smear of green here and there. Fifty men at a time, guarded by a shotgun trusty, would be allowed to go out into the Yard for an hour and walk, jump, run, waddle, or crawl-anything except stand and congregate and talk. Nail took advantage of being let out into the Yard to study the walls very carefully, to memorize the length and height and even the brick patterns of every section. He observed that the brick building of the engine room, which also contained Old Sparky and the death cells, was much closer to the wall than the main barracks. He noticed that at one place along the wall a corner of the engine building's roof obscured the view from the tower. Why, he asked himself, was he making all these observations if Viridis and Rindy were going to make the governor let him go? The answer, he told himself, was that week by week his chance of a pardon appeared slimmer and slimmer.

The month of March was marching on and he hadn't had his March trip to the visit room. Surely Viridis had at least tried to visit him. Once when Fat Gabe and Short Leg were making their rounds, Nail forgot that he was never supposed to question them. "Short Leg," he asked, "you don't reckon anybody came to see me at the visit room that you didn't tell me about, did they?"

Short Leg exchanged glances with Fat Gabe, the two of them astounded that an experienced convict would violate the cardinal rule against asking them questions. Short Leg didn't know whether to hit Nail or not, but when he raised his hand, Fat Gabe said, "He aint ready yet," and then he even smiled almost friendly-like at Nail and said, "We'll let that one go, Chism. Just watch it."

After the two sergeant-guards had moved on, Timbo Red exclaimed to Nail, "I tole ye, didn't I? They're jist a-waitin till ye git to lookin real peart afore they light into ye."