The Choiring Of The Trees (13 page)

I never returned to Paris, except when passing through. With Marguerite I traveled to Burgos and Madrid during May and back to southern France for June; in July we traveled through Switzerland and to Germany (Nuremberg, Strasbourg, Heidelberg, and Munich). In August we rented a studio for six weeks in Bruges. Then we went to London for a while. I loved hearing English spoken again, and I decided to change the title of my column to “An Arkansawyer in London”—which became in Tom Fletcher’s hands, of course, “An Arkansan in London.” Tom had a cousin living there, a Little Rock man named John Gould Fletcher, who was becoming a well-known poet, or trying to, and when Marguerite decided to go back to Paris (to study at La Palette, where she would meet her future husband, the artist William Zorach), John Gould Fletcher helped me find a room off St. Martin’s Lane, and Tom Fletcher raised my “salary” to ten dollars per column. I remained in London all that winter.

Before Marguerite returned to the United States and married Zorach, she invited me to rejoin her in the spring and summer of 1911, and we painted together in Avignon, Saint-Rémy, Aries, Les Baux, Martigues, and Marseilles. She and I shared a great love for the work of Vincent van Gogh and wished we had known him, and we tried to find the places he had painted in Arles, and we each painted our own versions of a little café in Arles that van Gogh had loved; neither of us imitated van Gogh, but we were inspired by him and felt a little of his passion. In those days not much was yet known or written about the life of van Gogh, who is very famous now, but I knew that he had been a very religious man who had remained a complete skeptic, and I knew that he had danced on the edge of insanity for a long time. I also knew that he had sold only one painting during his whole life, and although he had received slightly more for it than I had received for the portrait of Pablo, he had lived in wretched neglect and poverty. The painting I am proudest of having done during that period, which now hangs in the offices of the
Gazette,
is called
Olive Trees in Arles,
and it shows a quartet of low, twisting trees writhing and chanting in the southern sunshine against a background of mountains more like Cézanne’s than van Gogh’s. I did not use olive green in the picture but several shades of green that give the total effect of being olive: there are patterns of apple green, pea green, sea green, beryl, reseda, Kendal and Dartmouth greens, choiring together. The picture is suffused with a sense of hope, joy, and youth, although I wept the entire time I was painting it. Marguerite could not understand why I was crying my heart out while painting such a happy picture.

In October, Marguerite and her aunt and another friend prepared to sail on a voyage that would last seven months and take them to San Francisco by way of the Orient. Marguerite invited me to come, and assured me that I could make a good rail connection from Fresno to Little Rock—after, she hoped, serving as a bridesmaid at her wedding. I was homesick, and I said yes. We sailed from Venice, and I began to write for Tom Fletcher articles entitled “An Arkansawyer in Cairo,” “An Arkansawyer in Alexandria,” “An Arkansawyer in Palestine,” “An Arkansawyer in Port Said,” “An Arkansawyer in Calcutta,” “An Arkansawyer in Mandalay,” “An Arkansawyer in Hong Kong,” and “An Arkansawyer in Yokohama.” Needless to add, Tom Fletcher insisted each time on transforming me into an “Arkansan” before the columns saw print, but otherwise he ran most of them as I’d written them. He personally met my train when it arrived in Little Rock, because he alone had been wired from Fresno that I was coming home.

My father did not know, until he looked up from his desk in his private office at the bank one day and said, “Well, lookee who’s here! You sure have gone all the way around the world, haven’t you? Are you home to stay?”

From my purse I took a snub-nosed derringer I had been given by an art dealer in Los Angeles, and I let my father look into the barrel of it, and I said, “I’m home to stay, Daddy, but if you ever try to fuck me again, I’ll kill you.”

On

H
e did not know what to say. His eyes filled with tears. There was no mistaking the singing of the trees as their green boughs swayed, their limbs danced, their leaves rustled and trembled and quivered in quaver with their voices. A song of life.

“Well, Chism, you son of a bitch, what do you have to say?” the warden demanded.

“I,” said Nail. It was all he could get out for a moment, as if he had said “aye.” And at last he said the rest of it: “I’m right glad of that.”

“You better be ‘right glad,’ you bastard,” the warden commented. “Gabe, put the cuffs back on him. Take his stuff out of that death cell and throw him in with the others in the stockade. Let me know how he likes that.”

The two guards took his arms once again and started to lead him out of Old Sparky’s room. Fat Gabe was fit to be tied, he was so disappointed that Nail hadn’t got it. Nail was going to be in real trouble with Fat Gabe.

“Wait, Mr. Burdell,” said the lady from the newspaper, the one called Miss Monday. “Would it be possible for me to interview the prisoner before you return him to his cell?”

“Interview him?” said the warden. “What for?”

“Well,” she said, “I’d just like to write up how it feels to escape death.”

The warden snorted. “You jist heard him say he’s ‘right glad,’ didn’t you? What else could any man say?”

“Could I just ask him a few questions?” she requested.

The warden looked back and forth between the lady and Nail. “Okay,” the warden said. “Here he is. Ask him.”

“Do you mind?” she said. “He’s not going to feel free to talk with everyone standing around like this.”

“Well, I aint gon let y’all use the visit room,” Burdell told her. “We don’t let condemned men use the visit room.”

“He isn’t condemned anymore, is he?”

“He aint been pardoned, Miss Monday. He’s only been reprieved.”

The lady gestured at the witnesses’ chairs, two rows of wooden folding chairs at one side of Old Sparky’s room. “Couldn’t we just sit here a few minutes?” she asked.

Again the warden needed time to make up his mind. His brains is real slow, Nail reflected. “Well, okay, I guess,” he said finally. “I’ll have to leave Gabe here with y’all, and let me remind you, ma’am, this person is a convicted rapist and is dangerous. I ought to hang around too, but, hell, I’m late for my supper already.”

“Mr. McChristian can handle it,” the lady said, calling Fat Gabe by his proper name.

“
Mister
McChristian, huh?” the warden said, as if he’d never heard nobody call ole Gabe that before. “Well,
Mister
McChristian, you watch ’im, and if he tries any funny stuff you beat the everlastin sh—horse hockey out of him.”

The warden and the others left the room. Nail sat down in the same chair he’d sat in to watch Skip get electrocuted, and Miss Monday sat in the same chair where she’d been sitting. Fat Gabe watched them as if they were getting ready to pull something funny. A sudden inspiration occurred to Nail: he could reach inside his jacket, take his blade, kill Fat Gabe with it, then take the woman hostage and break out of here. He would have to handle it carefully: right now Fat Gabe was far enough away to pull his gun beforehand. Nail would have to get him closer. But with these handcuffs back on his wrists, he wasn’t sure that he could handle it, even if he got Fat Gabe close enough and moved fast enough. He hadn’t even had a chance when he’d tried to reach his blade as Fat Gabe and Short Leg were putting him into the chair. They hadn’t even given him enough time to—

“Hello.”

The lady had spoken to him. He realized he wasn’t paying her much attention. He looked at her. She had her notepad out, and a broken piece of charcoal pencil, which was all she had to write with, the same pencil she’d made that mark on his hand with before, the same pencil she’d used to draw that portrait of him that made him look so awful, the pencil now broken. “Howdy,” he said.

“How
does
it feel?” she asked. “Or is that a stupid question? Were you all prepared to die?”

“No, ma’am,” he answered her. “I’ll never be prepared to die, until I’m real old and there aint nothin to live for no more.”

She wrote this down, or tried to, the dull charcoal pencil making big clumsy letters, with few to a sheet before she had to turn the page over. Then she asked, “Did you really think it was going to happen? The execution, I mean. Did you still hope you might get a reprieve at the last minute?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he admitted.

“Could you tell me what was going through your mind during those last minutes?” she asked, and added, “If it’s not too hard.”

“Well,” he said. He thought. Both of them were looking not at each other but at Old Sparky sitting there forlorn and cheated but vengeful. He did not know quite how to say it, or even whether to try to tell her. Would she think he was nuts? Or just misunderstand? “I wasn’t really thinkin,” he said. “I was just listenin to the trees singin.”

Her mouth fell open. She thinks I’m crazy, he said to himself, and cursed himself for having tried to tell her. She asked, very quietly, almost whispering, “What did you say?”

“Never mind,” he said.

“No, tell me. Did you say—?”

“Forget it,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was sayin.”

“You said,” she said, “didn’t you? that you were listening to the trees singing? Did you say that?”

“Maybe,” he admitted. “I been feelin awful, tell you the truth, I don’t know what I was sayin.”

She laid a hand on his arm. “That’s strange, because—”

“Don’t touch the prisoner!” Fat Gabe hollered. “No con-tack allowed!”

She removed her hand and continued her sentence: “Because I was hearing the same thing. Trees. I heard trees singing. I swear.” She laughed, and observed, “I didn’t even know trees can sing.”

A strange lady. He smiled at her and waited for her to ask something else.

“Can they?” she asked.

“Can who what?” he said.

“Trees. Sing.”

“These were.”

“What kind of song?”

“Want me to play it for ye on my harmonica?”

“Yes! Would you?”

“Fat Gabe, would you fetch my harmonica?” he asked, grinning so Fat Gabe would know he was just funning.

Fat Gabe snarled, “I’d like to shove that mouth organ up your—Listen, Chism, why don’t y’all jist shut up this love song and git your goddamn talkin finished?”

“Do you really have a harmonica?” the lady asked Nail.

“Yes’m, I do,” he said.

“I hope—” she said. “I hope sometime I can have a chance to hear you play it.” Then she held out her hand. “My name is Viridis Monday.” He did not take her hand, and then she must have remembered that Fat Gabe had forbidden their touching, for she withdrew her hand.

“I reckon you know my name,” he said. “Pleased to meet ye. And you know, don’t ye? that I wouldn’t be alive right this minute if you hadn’t drew that pitcher.”

She smiled. She had such a nice, pretty, clean smile, teeth real good and straight and white. She didn’t use a whole lot of lip-rouge either, the way most women did these days. She said, “Mr. Chism, I’d like to help you. I’d like to do some investigating. I’m not really a reporter, I suppose you know. I’m just an illustrator. But I know how to do what reporters do, such as checking into facts. There’s one fact I’d like to determine: whether or not you…you actually did what they said you did, to that thirteen-year-old girl.”

Nobody had made any reference to Rindy in a long time, and at the mention of her Nail clenched his jaw, narrowed his eyes, and took an involuntary deep breath. “Lady,” he said, “there’s only three people on this earth who honestly and truly believe that I’m innocent. One of ’em is me, of course. The other’n is my mother. And the third one—” he paused, and gritted his teeth to pronounce her name: “is Miss Dorinda Whitter, the so-called victim.”

“I would like,” Miss Monday announced, “to talk to all three of you. Right now I’m talking to you. Why do you think the girl would have falsely accused you?”

“Now, that’s a real long story,” he said. “Fat Gabe aint et his supper either, and he aint gonna want to hang around and let me tell it to you. Right, Fat Gabe?”

“Boy,” Fat Gabe snarled, “I’ve tole you before: you don’t
never
ask me no questions. I do the askin, you hear me?”

“Yes, boss,” Nail said, knowing that Fat Gabe was going to get real mean with him as soon as this lady left. Again he flirted with the notion of killing Fat Gabe now and taking this lady hostage, but this lady, he decided, was too nice to have to be subjected to something like that.

“The first thing I’m going to do,” Miss Monday declared, “is find out the status of your reprieve. If Governor Hays did it himself, on his own, it’s probably got some political motive and is very temporary. If the Supreme Court made him do it, it might be permanent.” She stood up and stuck her notepad into the pocket of her coat, then pulled the coat tighter around herself. The sun had gone down; the room was very cold now. But Nail, despite the thinness of his cotton jacket, did not suffer the cold. The kindness of this lady warmed him.

He stood up too. “Lady—” he began, but decided that wasn’t polite enough. “Miss Monday, why are you doing this for me?”

Again that pretty smile. “I don’t know what song the trees sang,” she said. “But somehow it told me that the trees would be very sad if you were killed for something you didn’t do.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I thank you kindly.” And he reached out his handcuffs and shook hands with her.

“I said no con-tack, dammit!” Fat Gabe hollered, and moved closer.

They separated their hands. “I’d like to meet the trees,” she said, with one last of those smiles.

“This time of year,” he observed, “they’re as bare as bare can be.”

Off

F
at Gabe and Short Leg beat him up. He shouldn’t have talked back to them. They took him from the death room downstairs to his cell, that dark, dank, cold, tomb-like little space that had been his home for months, since the day in August they’d brought him to The Walls. The cell was in a sort of basement of the electric light and power building that held not just Old Sparky’s room but the transformers and dynamos and generators and the rest of that stuff that charged up Old Sparky and all the lights in The Walls and even some of the freeworld neighborhood out beyond in southwest Little Rock, along the Hot Springs highway. Fat Gabe and Short Leg took him back down to that hole, and Fat Gabe said, “Get your stuff.”