The Choiring Of The Trees (35 page)

“But the shadows of doubt are all around Nail Chism,” she said.

The governor sighed and passed his hand across his eyes. “Are you aware,” he asked, “that for seven years before becoming governor, I was a circuit judge myself? I know the burdens that Lincoln Villines faced, and I know how carefully he had to proceed in that lower court. But before I became a circuit judge, I was a farmer. I grew up on an impoverished farm in the scrub of Ouachita County, and until I was the age of Nail Chism, I was, like him, a simple farmer. Although I did not resort to the illegal manufacture of liquor to supplement my modest income, I saved my money to finance a legal education at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. No, I have not been to Paris, but I have been to Virginia, a civilized place, the home of such men as George Mason and Thomas Jefferson, men who, despite their ownership of slaves, opposed slavery and favored abolition, but who believed, as I believe, that abolition can only be accomplished very slowly and gradually, not all at once, as we learned to our regret. It is the same with capital punishment.”

The governor pointed out the lone black waiter who was still blotting up the brandy, and George W. Hays began to talk about him as if the man could not hear. “Do you think this man is ready for complete freedom? Do you think he is capable of making the wise decisions that are required by the responsibilities of citizenship? This particular individual, I happen to know, is not the low-grade type of nigra who crowds our penitentiary and our charitable institutions, but he is still quite primitive and in a childish stage of progress, not yet intelligent enough to hold public office or aspire to one of the professions, or…”

Viridis discovered that she was not paying close attention; her mind was wandering, and her gaze was straying from the governor’s face—he looked so much like an older version of Tom Fletcher, with his protruding eyeballs and thick lips—to the wallpaper, and to her own hands in her lap. The governor seemed to have arrived at the notion that there was some connection between the plight of Nail Chism and what the governor called “the most serious problem of the nigra question.” At least he did not say “nigger,” as so many did. If Viridis tried very hard, and did not drink any more peach brandy, she could focus on his words and detect that he was now discussing the achievement of his administration in separating the white and colored convicts. One of his first acts as governor was the purchase of the Tucker plantation to serve as a “white-convict farm,” wherein the exclusively white inmates could pursue their agricultural labors free from any contact with “culluds.” This, the governor attempted to explain to her, was in keeping with his “concept of the age, and well-advanced civilization.”

She interrupted. “And how would the execution of Nail Chism fit into a well-advanced civilization?”

“It would manifest the sentiment of the community that the community will not tolerate the violation of the sexual sanctity of the fair sex!”

“But the community,” Viridis pointed out, “that is, Nail Chism’s community, has given you petitions signed by four thousand people, more than half the population of Newton County, who do not believe that he violated the sexual sanctity of anyone.”

The governor was fiddling with the silverware. He picked up a dinner knife and held it as if to stab her with it and said, “Miss Monday, if I were to murder you right now, and later fifty thousand residents of Pulaski County signed a petition that I had not done it, would that make me innocent of the crime?” The governor did not wait for her answer. “No: petitions never exonerate, they only beg, and I will not lend an ear to beggary.”

“Nor will you lend an ear to
anyone’s
protestation that Nail Chism is innocent.”

The governor sighed again and leaned back in his chair and regarded her for a few moments before saying, “Let me ask you. You seem so convinced of the man’s absolute guiltlessness. Would
you
want to find yourself alone with him in that child’s playhouse, or wherever it was he raped her?”

“I would feel perfectly safe with Nail Chism.”

The governor snorted in disbelief. “You would? I’m going to call your bluff, young lady. What if I threatened to throw you into his cage?”

“Do you mean put me alone into his cell?” she asked.

“Not just that,” he said. “The man is occupying the so-called death hole down in the dungeon of the powerhouse out at the pen. It’s like solitary confinement. And it’s very
dark
most of the time, Miss Monday. Very dark and scary. Would you want to be locked in there with him?”

“For how long?”

“Long enough for you to beg to be let out. Long enough for you to realize just how ‘innocent’ he is. Long enough for you to cease and desist this humiliating campaign to save him from the chair.”

“Are you saying that if I shouted, somebody would come and rescue me?”

The governor chuckled. “Not quickly. Not
too
quickly,” he said, and let the implication sink in. “When Nail Chism tries to harm you, it will take a while for you to summon the guards. We hope. Yes, I am going to call your bluff, Miss Monday, and I am going to have you locked up with that man.”

“When?”

“I’ll talk to Warden Yeager in the morning, and—I think it probably begins to get very dark in the death hole about the middle of the afternoon. Can you go to Warden Yeager’s office at three
P.M.
?”

“Yes.”

The governor was startled by the quickness of her reply. “Are you absolutely sure you want to go through with this?”

“Are you sure you would let me?”

“You bet I am. I just want you to promise me that as soon as we let you out of there, you’ll leave us alone. I would even be willing to wager that you’ll be so changed in your opinion of that hillbilly pervert that you’ll gladly attend his execution, which I intend to carry out at the earliest opportunity, if I have to pull the switch myself.”

Viridis stood up. “Three
P.M.
Warden Yeager’s office,” she said, taking her leave.

At the door he said, “You won’t need your nightgown or your toothbrush. Good night, Miss Monday.”

She did not sleep that night. Her insomnia made her confront the question: what if she had been deluded about Nail? What if he actually was a rapist? She even imagined a scene in which he confessed that he had raped Dorinda and that he couldn’t help himself. She anticipated that he was only an apparition of the man she had loved: he smelled abominable and the cell was the filthiest place she’d ever been. Such sleeplessness forced her eventually to picture (or did she actually sleep, and dream?) the act of love they tried to make, and it was not good at all.

In the morning, as she dressed and got herself ready for the day, and then as she baked three dozen cookies (oatmeal, chocolate, and pecan) to take with her, she told herself that the dream, or the conscious fantasy if that’s what it had been, was just an attempt to consider, and dismiss, the worst contingencies. It would not be like that, at all. She and Nail would not even consider sex. It would defeat their purpose. They would talk, and talk, and talk, and possibly hold hands, maybe even, yes! they would kiss, although Nail himself would be very self-conscious and ill at ease because of his appearance (but it will be dark, remember?) and the fact that they hadn’t let him take a bath in ages. She would do a good job of ignoring the unsavory atmosphere.

She told no one where she was going. She told her mother that she wouldn’t be home for supper and might be gone overnight. At 2:30
P.M.
she telephoned for a taxicab and rode it to the penitentiary. She was met at the visitors’ room by the sergeant with the short leg, Mr. Fancher, who escorted her out of the room across the outside length of the wall to another door, the one she had used several times before. It was a heavy, arched wooden door upon which Mr. Fancher rapped the familiar trite code, the beats of “Shave and a haircut, two bits.” A trusty opened it and admitted them to the fenced corridor leading across the Yard to the powerhouse and the main building. In the upper windows of the main building, open to the late-April air, men whistled and howled, “Hey, babe!” and, “Up here, sweetie!” and, “Sugar, come and git it!”

Mr. Fancher escorted her to the warden’s office. The new warden, Travis Don Yeager, met her at his door and invited her in. He was about fifty, and her first impression of him was slightly more favorable than that of Harris Burdell: he seemed cut from the same mold, and she guessed that he, like Burdell, must have spent countless hours in front of a mirror practicing a look of fierce determination and strength. But he tried to be polite, at first. “Welcome to the Arkansas State Penitentiary, Miss Monday!”

“I’ve been here before,” she said.

“Yeah. Right. I didn’t think.” He made a mouth that might have been intended as a smile but came out as a smirk. “We oughta send you up to Jacksonville hee hee, our state farm for women hee hee, but we understand you prefer the company of males hee hee. I see you didn’t bring your suitcase hee hee.”

“I don’t expect to stay long,” she said.

“You gonna sleep in that dress hee hee?”

“If I sleep.”

“Hee hee! Baby, you got the right idea.
If
you sleep, that’s right,
if
you sleep hee hee. Well, are you all ready to go down and meet your roommate hee hee?”

“I’ve met him.”

“You have? Well, that’s nice. Did he tell you what he’s gonna do to you? Aint you just a little bit scared hee hee?”

“No.”

“Man’s a convicted rapist. Did a job so awful on a little girl they gave him the chair, only the second white man ever to get the chair in history hee hee.”

“I’m familiar with all the facts of the case,” she said. “I’m ready to go.”

“
Are
you now? Real
eager
and rarin to go? Hot to trot hee hee. You got it bad, sister.”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Don’t mind what?”

“I didn’t come here to listen to your jokes. I came to see Nail Chism.”

He dropped his light tone. “Sit down, lady,” the warden ordered her, gesturing to a chair.

“Why? Do I have to submit to an interview or make out an application?”

“SIT
DOWN
, Miss Monday,” he commanded, and put a hand on her shoulder and made her sit. Then he went around behind his desk and sat down. He studied her for a moment, and when he spoke again there was a remnant of the original politeness. “You honestly amaze me. You really came in here expectin us to let you move in with that rapist. You really truly meant to go through with it.”

“What are you telling me?” she demanded. “Aren’t you going to let me do it?”

“Do you think I’m crazy, girl?”

“I don’t care whether
you
are crazy or not. The governor told me I could do it. In fact, it was his suggestion.”

“Yeah, but he never thought you would. He told me to see if you showed up, he said he’d bet me that you wouldn’t show up, but if you did, to find out if you really wanted to do it. You honestly want to do it, don’t you?” The warden began shaking his head slowly back and forth as if he still couldn’t believe it. “Maybe you’re the crazy one hee hee. Don’t you know you’d never get out of there alive? That man’s got a dagger hidden somewhere down in his cell, and he’d slash your throat as soon as he got finished rapin you hee hee.”

“I’ll take the chance,” she said. “Isn’t that what this is supposed to be about? Taking the chance? Proving to all of you that he won’t rape me, he won’t kill me?”

The warden shook his head. “Too much of a risk. Maybe you’re right. But if you was wrong, and anything happened to you, the newspapers would really haul us over the coals, and your family would sue the state of Arkansas.”

She could only repeat, feebly, “The governor told me I could do it.” “You still don’t get it, do you? He was just testin you, ma’am. The governor told me not to let you under no circumstances get nowhere near that rapist.”

“Couldn’t I just visit with him awhile, under supervision? Couldn’t I just give him these cookies?” She held up the paper sack containing three dozen oatmeal, chocolate, and pecan cookies.

The warden glanced at the sack. He said, “You’re just another one of them women that latch on to convicts and make boyfriends out of them, like they’re toys or cuddly bears or something. All of you ladies are crazy. You think you can turn them into nice little boys, and you’re mistaken. You think you can save their souls or mend their manners or something, and you’re wrong, and it’s gonna kill you to find out how wrong you are. I been workin in prisons since I was a kid, and you wouldn’t believe the number of broken hearts I’ve seen you ladies get.” Again he slipped into his politeness and softly said, “I’m not gonna let nobody break
your
heart, darlin hee hee.”

“Could I please see him for a while in the visitors’ room?”

As if reading from a book, he said, “Condemned inmates of the death cells may not be transmitted to the visiting quarters.”

“Then couldn’t you, as a consolation for disappointing me, take me down to the death hole and let me talk to him through his bars?”

“It’s awful down there, ma’am. I wouldn’t want to go down there myself.”

“I can stand it.”

“Sorry. It’s against the rules. We do everything by the rules here.”

“May I use your telephone?”

“Help yourself. What for?”

“I’m going to tell the governor that you won’t even let me see Nail Chism after tricking me into thinking I could get into his cell.”

“Well, durn,
I
never tricked you. How long did you want to stay down in the death hole?”

“As long as you’ll let me.”

“Well, the visit rules say fifteen minutes in the visit room. Would fifteen minutes down there suit you?”

“Not as much as staying all night, but it’ll do.”

“You can’t take them cookies. The prisoners have a strict diet hee hee. Leave them and your handbag here in my office.” The warden summoned the guard, James Fancher, and asked him, “Hey, Jim, is that electric light bulb wired up down in the death hole yet?” The guard shook his head. “Well, you go get Gill, and you boys take a lantern and show this lady down there, for fifteen minutes, and let her talk to Chism. Watch ’em, and don’t you let her touch him nor give him nothing nor do anything ’cept talk.”