The Choiring Of The Trees (39 page)

“Sometimes,” Nail said, and then asked, “Which one of us are ye aimin to do first?”

“Good question, Chism hee hee,” Yeager said. “I really aint given it no thought. Got any preference hee hee?”

“I’d ’preciate it if you’d do him first,” Nail said.

Nail heard Ernest agree. “Yeah, do me first. I don’t want to watch you’uns do Nail.”

The warden looked back and forth between the two of them in their separate cells, trying to stand midway between them. He leaned toward Nail and asked, “You scared to go first? Or you still think somebody’s gonna save you a third time hee hee?”

“Nossir, I jist don’t want Ernest to have to watch me.”

“Let me think about it,” the warden said. “I caint promise nothin hee hee.” He went back upstairs.

Later in the afternoon Jimmie Mac came, but he was still pretending that Nail didn’t exist. He only wanted to see if Ernest was ready to be baptized. He had been working on Ernest all week, trying to baptize him. Jimmie Mac had even got to the point where he was willing to go ahead and baptize Ernest even if Ernest would not confess and repent. He wanted to make one last effort. “Son, just a few more hours and you’ll stand there at those pearl-studded gates and they won’t let you in,” he said. Nail couldn’t hear what-all Ernest was replying, but it took him a while. They went on talking in the next cell. Ernest had told Nail that up around Timbo where he came from everybody thought you had to be totally immersed in water to be saved, and there wasn’t noplace around this pen where they could totally immerse you, and he didn’t care to be sprinkled, although he didn’t exactly mind it neither, it probably wasn’t any worse than getting your head shaved. Finally Nail heard Jimmie Mac saying, “Son, you’ll never regret this,” and then some more talking, and then Jimmie Mac said real loud, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, amen,” and then it was silent for a while before Jimmie Mac asked, “Don’t you feel like shouting?” Nail didn’t hear what Ernest answered, but it wasn’t a shout.

At suppertime, sure enough, they brought Nail a platter of chicken and dumplings, and Ernest an honest-to-God porterhouse with all the trimmings. Those prison folks in Tennessee, or wherever it was, sure had the right idea. As Ernest put it, “By gonnies, I’d let ’em ’lectercute me ever night if they’d feed me like this aforehand.”

They weren’t given any time after supper to sit around on the porch and shoot the breeze or watch the hound dog chew his tail. Warden Yeager returned, accompanied by Fat Gill, Short Leg, and a couple of armed black trusties. Was it time already to go upstairs? Warden Yeager said, “Well now, gentlemen hee hee, not that I don’t take your word for it that you’ll be orderly during these proceedings, but just to be safe hee hee we are going to have to search you. Take off your hee hee clothes.”

They opened the cell doors and made Nail and Ernest strip down naked. Of course Nail had anticipated this and had nothing around his neck except the tree charm. Warden Yeager fingered the tree charm, turning it over and even squinting at the inscription on the back of it. He decided to let Nail wear it but nothing else. They took away his clothes and turned the cell upside down looking for his blade. They tore up his Bible and ripped up the bed. It was Warden Yeager, maybe not so numbskulled after all, who realized it was inside the harmonica, where it had originated; he took the harmonica apart and removed the dagger and held it up in front of Nail’s face and said, “Mister, does this belong to you, any chance hee hee?” Nail did not answer. The warden began to shake—out of checked anger, Nail thought at first, but then decided the warden was shaking the way you do when you’ve had a narrow escape. “Maybe we’ll make you go first hee hee,” the warden said, and Nail realized something else: whenever the warden made that sound “hee hee” it wasn’t because he didn’t know whether to laugh or to cough but because he was just real nervous. Yeah, T.D. Yeager was sure one nervous feller.

Jimmie Mac returned and said it was time for them to leave their cells. “Why, howdy, Nail,” Ernest said at the sight of naked Nail standing handcuffed outside his door. “I aint seen you in a coon’s age. Do I look as bad as you do?” Yes, it had been all of a month since they’d last laid eyes on each other, although they had talked so much they hardly had anything left to say, and yes, Ernest looked pretty awful with his red hair all gone except around his pecker. Now it was Ernest who began to protest to the guards, “Hey! Aint you gonna give us our clothes back? We caint go up thar nekkid as the day we was born! What if they’s a lady present?”

“They aint no lady present,” Fat Gill assured them. Nail sighed with relief, and soon saw what he meant: among the few witnesses there was no woman, no Viridis, not yet anyhow, and he hoped she would never come. Even if she did, they wouldn’t let her into the room as long as he and Ernest had their peckers a-hanging down. There wasn’t no governor neither. Just five strangers…well, one of them he had seen before, a newspaperman who’d been here the last time. He was the only one of the five who looked like he cared, and he was raising his eyebrows at the sight of these two convicts stark-naked. The death room was still illuminated only by the light from that one green-shaded bulb up near the ceiling, so it wasn’t as if their genitals were exposed to harsh spotlight. In such darkness Nail didn’t even feel naked.

Warden Yeager explained to the newspaperman, “We aint takin any chances this time hee hee. Were you here when the last warden had a little problem?”

“Yes, I was,” the newspaperman said. “Well, ‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither.’”

“What’s that from?” the warden asked.

Jimmie Mac butted in. “The Bible. Book of Job, one and twenty-one. ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessèd be the name of the Lord.’ And the Good Book goes on, next chapter, ‘Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life.’”

The warden looked at Jimmie Mac uncertainly and asked, “Are you supposed to say a lot?”

“Just the final prayer,” Jimmie Mac informed him, clearly liking the position of telling the new warden what was what.

“I aint been through this before,” the warden declared, as if anybody needed to be told. “Do you say the final prayer now, or do we wait till Bobo gets here?”

The newspaperman spoke up. “We ought to wait till the governor gets here.” He’d hardly said those words when the turnkey opened the guests’ door, and in walked a man who surely was the governor, with another man who looked like he must be the local sheriff, and a third man who must be the governor’s bodyguard.

“Good heavens!” said the man who must be governor, and accosted the warden, demanding, “Why are these men naked?”

“We found that blade, Your Honor hee hee,” Yeager said. “I thought we would, and we stripped ’em and searched ’em to be sure, and Chism had a blade. I found it hee hee.”

“Well, why are they just standing around like that?” the governor asked. He was more nervous than the warden, and looked like he was hunting for a place to relieve himself. “Why don’t you do something?”

“We will, Your Honor,” Yeager said. “We were just waitin for you to get here.”

The governor looked around at the others in the room, squinting in the semidarkness to see how many were there. “If I’m saying there shall be only six witnesses,” the governor said, “then there can be only six witnesses. Some of you men will have to go. Like
you,
Fletcher. Why don’t you take off?”

The newspaperman laughed. “There has to be at least one of us poor ink-stained devils here, and it’s me,” he said.

The governor and his party evicted three of the other witnesses and took their seats, the governor sitting on the front row. The governor glanced at Nail’s pecker and then at Ernest’s, as if he were comparing them. “Do these men have to keep standing like that?” he asked the warden.

“Which one do you want us to do first hee hee, Your Honor?”

“Yeager, I’m not a courtroom judge anymore, you know. I’m not ‘Your Honor’ now.”

The newspaperman, behind his hand but audible to everyone, said to Yeager, “He’s ‘Your Excellency.’”

“Yeah!” Yeager said. “Hee hee. Your Excellency, which one of these men should we fry—should we electrocute first?”

The governor turned around in his chair to speak to the newspaperman. “Fletcher, where is Miss Monday?”

“I have no idea, Your Excellency,” the newspaperman said. “I haven’t seen her for several days.”

“Hmm,” said the governor in a tone of disappointment. “I was hoping she…” The governor did not finish what he was about to say. Was he hoping she’d show up? From what Viridis had told Nail, the governor couldn’t even stand the sight of her.

Jimmie Mac spoke up: “Warden, and Your Excellency sir, it’s almost sundown. The law says a man has to be dead before sundown, and there’s two of them to do this time.”

The governor stared at Jimmie Mac. “Who are you?” he asked. “Are you Mr. Bobo?”

“No, he’s the chaplain, Your Excellency,” the warden said.

“Oh,” the governor said. “You’re supposed to comfort the men, right? Well, go ahead and comfort them, don’t let me bother you.” He seemed to expect Jimmie Mac to pat Nail on the back or offer him a handkerchief. After a long silence the governor said, “Well, make them sit down,” and the warden motioned for his guards to get Nail and Ernest seated in a pair of the witness chairs.

A longer silence followed. Out of modesty and for the governor’s sake, Nail and Ernest kept their handcuffed wrists over their genitals and sat with as much dignity as they could. It was so quiet that Nail began to hear it. He had wondered at what point, this time, he would begin to hear it again: the choiring of the trees. Now it was very faint: the trees were still up there on that mountain top in Stay More, and their voices had a long way to go before they could be heard. He glanced out of the corner of his eye at Ernest, to see if Ernest was hearing it too. He had told Ernest all about the trees, to get him ready. Ernest was smiling, and was the calmest person in the room. The faint singing of the trees was interrupted by a spoken observation from the governor: “Well, it appears that…that nobody else is going to come.” He began to look back and forth between the two condemned men again, comparing not their peckers this time but their faces, as if trying to make a decision between them. Finally his forefinger came up and pointed at Nail. The governor said, “Let’s do him first.”

Ernest spoke up: “Your Excellency, if it don’t make a whole lot of difference one way or the other, I would sure appreciate it if you would do me first.”

The governor gave Ernest a look that had a touch of compassion to it. Certainly, Ernest’s words had been well chosen and fine spoken, but his voice had been that of what he was: a boy just sixteen years old. The voice was out of place, out of keeping with the other voices in this dark, still room. But the governor did not understand why Ernest wanted to go first; nobody, not even Nail, wanted to try to explain to the governor just how it was. The governor misunderstood. “That’s commendable and brave,” he said to Ernest, “but Mr. Chism was here first, and he’s older, and he’s going first.” The governor gave an impatient flap of his hand, and the two guards lifted Nail out of his seat and walked him to the electric chair, and this time he was careful not even to show any sign of struggle as they strapped him in. This time they remembered to put the metal cap on top of his head, and this time, given the warmth of the merry month of May, the metal cap wasn’t so cold as it touched the raw skin of his scalp.

Jimmie Mac prompted the warden: “Now you’re supposed to ask him if he has any last words.”

“Right hee hee,” the warden said. “Mr. Chism, before we solemnly carry out the sentence of this state which has been imposed on you hee hee, would you care to address the gathering with any concluding remarks hee hee?”

Nail tried to smile. “Yeah. Where’s Bobo?”

They had forgotten him. The warden was a bundle of nerves, the governor didn’t know whether he was coming or going, Jimmie Mac was intoxicated with his sense of being in charge, and nobody but Ernest was still breathing normally. Now the warden really got flustered, and he said to Fat Gill, “Well, just where in hell
is
Bobo?”

Fat Gill shrugged; it was all new to him. Short Leg, the only experienced man here except for Jimmie Mac, spoke up: “He’s probably out in the engine room fiddlin with the dynamo. Want me to go look?” The warden nodded, and Short Leg went out through the door that Bobo always came in through, that led to the power plant. Short Leg returned almost immediately, saying, “Here he is.”

Drunk as usual—no, drunker than usual—Bobo shuffled in carefully as if trying to make sure he was putting his feet in the right place. The governor, for one, was shocked. “Is that man drunk? Has Mr. Bobo been drinking?”

Jimmie Mac, all-knowing, explained to His Excellency, “Yessir, he’s always like that. It’s a pardonable sin, wouldn’t you say? Considering what he has to do…”

Bobo could barely lift a hand to the switch, but did, and stood there in a hurry to get it over with.

Jimmie Mac prompted the warden again: “Last words.”

“Okay, here we go,” the warden said, rubbing his hands together. “Last words, Chism?”

The trees were singing Nail’s last words for him. They were in full voice now, rising and soaring in song. Anything he might say would be so feeble and earthly by comparison. He shook his head.

“No last words?” The warden looked to Jimmie Mac for guidance.

Jimmie Mac was mumbling the end of the Lord’s Prayer, but he interrupted himself to say, “You’re supposed to ask Bobo, ‘Ready, Bobo?’”

The warden turned. “Ready, Bobo?”

Bobo nodded.

Jimmie Mac said, “You’re supposed to raise your hand like this, and then drop it, like this.”

Bobo did not wait for the warden to copy Jimmie Mac. Drunk and blind, Bobo took Jimmie Mac’s gesture as his authority and threw the switch and closed the circuit.

But nothing happened. The governor, the newspaperman, all of the men in the room jumped an inch in their chairs and cringed and shivered, but nothing happened. The green-shaded ceiling light did not dim, the dynamo did not whine. In the silence—only it wasn’t complete silence, because of the trees—the governor asked, “Who’s singing?” and looked around trying to locate the choir. Everyone stared at Bobo. Nail turned his head and stared at Bobo, who still had the switch turned on but was looking down at his feet as if ashamed of his failure to make any current come to the chair. Then he staggered toward the chair itself and began fiddling with the wires one by one.