The Choiring Of The Trees (41 page)

“Well, I’ll declare,” Nail said. “Now all I need is a visitor.”

The warden gestured toward the opposite door, which Bird was guarding in a new uniform that made him look like a hotel doorman. “She’s in there hee hee,” Yeager said.

“Huh?” Nail said. Then he said, “Oh. Warden Yeager, sir, you sure are a nice man.”

“Don’t thank me hee hee,” the warden said. “It was the Reverend Tomme who made these improvements. Now, enjoy your visit hee hee. Bird, you let ’em talk all they want, just don’t let her give him nothin except what’s already been inspected.”

“Yessir,” Bird said, and saluted like some goddamn soldier, then opened the door. She stood there, in the doorway, in a green summertime outfit that was thin and silky, a shade of green that matched her eyes and made Nail notice how her hair caught the light in soft red sparks. She came in. Nail stood on his side of the table waiting for her. She came up to the table, studied the barrier-board between them, and raised her hands as if to make sure the screen was gone. She looked uncertainly at Bird. “Y’all can kiss, that’s all,” Bird informed her.

They both had to put their hands on the tabletop to steady themselves as they leaned toward each other across the divider. His hands were still cuffed together. It took what seemed to him like an awful long time to reach her, to get there. Seeing Toy out of the corner of his eye, he began to wonder if his own breath was bad and tried to keep his mouth clamped tight shut, but he had to make at least a little pucker of his lips. Nail had never kissed a girl before. Not once. As her face began the long journey across the tabletop, she was smiling, but as she came closer the smile vanished, and she seemed as if she were about to faint and closed her eyes. He kept his eyes open for fear he’d miss her completely. He realized their noses were going to get in the way, and he tilted his nose to his left, but at that instant she tilted her nose in that direction too, then opened her eyes to see why he hadn’t made contact yet; seeing their noses in the way, she tilted her head back in the other direction at the same instant he was heading that way himself, and they had to stop and start all over again until they could somehow silently agree to tilt their noses in opposite directions and get them out of the way. They made a short, simultaneous laugh of self-consciousness. And then her lips were touching his. It was almost like that time Bobo had given him a quick little charge of current, not that it was painful but it jolted him like something he had never expected to feel and wasn’t ready for. He heard those trees, the same singing he’d sometimes heard in the death room. It was real nice. Sometimes, playing his harmonica, he had tried to imagine what it would be like kissing Viridis, but he’d never realized it would be as nice as this, or that it would make him tingle to the tips of his toes. He closed his eyes. The singing of the trees continued until finally it was hushed by Bird’s harsh voice: “That’s enough now.” They disengaged and backed away from the middle of the table.

“Hi, Nail,” she said, smiling.

“Howdy, Viridis,” he said.

“Y’all sit down, now,” Bird said, and they sat in their chairs on opposite sides of the table and looked at each other across the wooden board. The couples on either side of them went on talking. Toy’s woman was saying something about a store burning in De Vall’s Bluff, and the black man was asking his woman if the white folks she worked for were treating her proper. They paid no attention to Nail and Viridis.

“How are you?” Viridis asked, rather formally.

“I am real fine, I reckon,” he answered, somewhat formally himself. “And how are you?”

“I am very hopeful,” she said. “Everything is looking up. They’re treating you decently, aren’t they?”

“Compared with the way it was before,” he said, “it is sure decent.”

“You look good,” she said. “You’re putting on some weight.”

He ran his hand over his bare skull. “My head don’t look too good, I guess.”

“Your hair’s starting to grow back,” she observed. “And they’ll never shave it again.” She repeated: “Never.”

“I don’t know how to thank you for what you done to stop that last execution, because I don’t know for sure just what you done, but me and Ernest both are awful glad you did.”

She smiled. She just smiled that real pretty smile of hers, like she wasn’t going to tell him a thing about what she done. “I hear the…thingamajig in the power plant—the dynamo or whatever you call it, that powers the electric chair—was incapacitated,” she said.

“Yeah. Incapacitated.” He liked the sound of that word. “Dempsey, the new guy, that I’m workin for, he says he can’t figure it out. Something’s busted bad in that dynamo, but I might be able to fix it myself.” He laughed. “Wouldn’t that be something? For me to learn enough about electricity to fix the dynamo so they can go ahead and finish fryin me with it?”

She did not laugh. She leaned close toward the barrier and lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “Nail, the dynamo has a Number 12 cartridge fuse that has been removed and is hidden on the top shelf of the broom closet in the engine room. Leave it there.”

Nail nodded his head. And then he nodded it again, and just left it nodding. At length he asked, “How did you know that’s what it was?”

“It’s written on the side of the fuse,” she said.

“I didn’t think Bobo was smart enough to read,” he said.

“
Nail,
” she said. She just said his name, but the way she said it seemed to mean, Let’s quit pretending we don’t both know what happened.

He kept his voice down. “Where’d you git the fake mustache?”

She giggled. “It wasn’t fake. It was his. I cut it off.”

“How did he like that?”

“He was dead drunk, and he was still dead drunk when I put his clothes back on him and left him. I doubt he ever woke up until the next morning.”

Nail felt his face getting red, and he knew Viridis could notice the blush. He observed, “You must’ve seen me and Ernest without a stitch.”

“A stitch is a stitch,” she said. “It’s all the same to me.” They both laughed so hard that Bird snapped to attention from his half-bored stance. “You do have a nice body,” she went on. Did she enjoy keeping the blush on his face? “How did that
Post-Dispatch
reporter say it? ‘Chism is a blue-eyed, light-haired, fair-complexioned man of splendid physique despite what harsh incarceration has done to it.’”

The blush stayed. “I never read no story of that kind,” he said.

“I’m keeping a scrapbook for you,” she said.

Trying to change the subject, he said, “There’s something I can’t figure out. How did you get inside The Walls if you didn’t have Bobo with you?”

Very quietly she rapped out on the tabletop,
Shave and a haircut, two bits.
“That’s the code for the door at the main gate,” she said. “But to get into the powerhouse, I also had Bobo’s key-ring on my belt…
his
belt, which I was wearing. That key-ring is the only thing of his I’ve kept.”

Nail whistled, then whispered, “You still have Bobo’s
keys
?”

She nodded. “He doesn’t need them anymore. For instance,” she lowered her voice even more, “did you notice there’s a long ladder lying against one wall of the engine room?”

“Yeah, and it’s padlocked on both ends to the wall,” he said.

“The key to the padlocks,” she whispered, “is in my hand. Before I have to go, I’ll slip it into my mouth. Then, when I kiss you goodbye, I’ll put it into your mouth. Okay?”

“Viridis,” he said, “you are as good as they make ’em. I mean, you are really truly good as all gitout. But there’s just one other thing I’d have to git…”

She didn’t give him a chance to finish. “On the same shelf of the broom closet where the dynamo fuse is hidden,” she said, “is Irvin Bobo’s empty whiskey pint in a paper sack. Only it isn’t empty. I filled it with mustard oil.”

He shook his head. And then he shook it again and just left it shaking. “You didn’t leave a railroad ticket up there too, didje?” he asked, laughing.

“Shh,” she hushed him. “No, but I could tie Rosabone to a tree out by the swamp,” she said, meaning it.

“I’ll go on foot,” he said.

“Where?” she asked.

“
Where
? Why, home, of course.”

She shook her head. “That’s the first place they’ll look for you.”

“Where else would I go?” he asked. “Mexico?”

She whispered again. “I could hide you up in the attic of my house.” When he frowned and shook his head, she said, “I could really make a nice room up there, and you could have
anything
you want.”

“Anything except mountains and meadows and creeks and country,” he said. He shook his head again. “No, I thank ye kindly, but I’ll light out for the back of beyond. I don’t mean I aim to git my old bed back, in the homeplace. But there’s some hollers I know up on the mountain where aint nobody ever been, except Indians. Places where nobody could find me.”

“Could I find you?”

“Not if I didn’t draw ye a map.”

“Draw me a map.”

“When the time comes. I aint leavin tonight. First I’ve got to figger some way to git upstairs from the death hole in the middle of the night.”

“Whatch’all talkin about?” Bird said, and they looked up to see him leaning over them. Had he been listening? Had he heard anything they said? Would he snitch? Nail grew very anxious. But Bird was simply intent on announcing, “Y’all just got about five minutes left.”

“All right,” Viridis said. Bird backed away to his guard spot, and they went on talking. Viridis said, “I hope you don’t mind if I visit with Ernest after you leave.”

“Mind?” he said. “Course I don’t mind. You know he don’t have no folks to visit him from up home, where he comes from, up around Timbo. You gonna kiss him too?”

“I just want to talk about his drawings,” she said. “Has he started using his pastels yet?”

“Those colored chalks? Yeah, he’s covered a new pad with ’em. Did you bring back his old pad?”

She shook her head. “Does he need it? I had most of those framed to show to people to help save him from the chair.”

Nail said, “There’s one of them I hope you didn’t have framed. Ernest forgot it was in the pad, and he sure was mortified at the thought you seen it.”

It was her turn to blush. He was glad to see that she could. She’d caused him so many blushes. “No,” she said. “I’m not showing that to anyone. Who is the girl?”

“What girl?”

“That he drew you in bed with.”

“What makes you think it was me?”

“Nail. It looks just like you.”

“He’s shore a good artist, aint he?”

“Who’s the girl?”

“Aw, she’s jist some story I tole him. There wasn’t never nobody like that. He jist made her up. I mean, I jist made her up, and
he
jist drew her.”

“You’ve never been to bed with a girl?”

“Sorry, y’all’s time is up,” Bird said, and handed her a basket. “Lady, you can give ’im this now.”

Viridis had brought him a basket of goodies, which had gone through an inspection by another trusty-guard in the anteroom. It contained fruit, cookies, men’s hosiery, underclothes, handkerchiefs, books, packages of chewing-gum. Bird said to her, “You hid two things in there that’s not allowed, and you can pick ’em up outside. He can’t have that harmonica, and he can’t have that letter.”

“Oh, dear,” Viridis said. “Well, that’s too bad.”

“You can just mail him the letter,” Bird suggested. “But I don’t know about that harmonica. They prolly wouldn’t let him keep it, on account of
before.
”

“I guess I’ll have to say good-bye,” Viridis said. “I can’t say anything else.” Nail saw why she couldn’t say anything else: she had put something into her mouth. Pretending to wipe her lips in preparation for a parting kiss, she put the padlock key into her mouth. Bird wasn’t paying much attention anyway; kissing seemed to make him squirm. They leaned across the table, and again Nail felt the spark of their lips meeting, and wondered if the Rowland book had any explanation for that. Her lips parted, and the key came through them, between his, into his mouth. Suddenly he was aware of a tightening in his pants. He took the key into his mouth and, unable to talk, nodded his head good-bye to her. Later he wished he had thought to tell her he loved her before he got the key in his mouth. He had planned to say so during the meeting but never did.

Ernest came back to the death hole from his fifteen minutes with Viridis more cheerful than Nail had ever seen him. He had got permission from the trusties to pass the new sketchbook across to her, and they had talked about his pastel drawings, which were considerably more complicated than the black-and-whites he had been doing. Viridis had made a few suggestions but mostly had just complimented him, and had said “Ooh” or “Ahh” as she turned the pages, and just made him feel real good watching her eyes and her face as she looked at his work. She had also brought him a basket, with pretty much the same things she’d brought Nail—“enough cookies to choke a horse”—as well as a couple of art books,
Advanced Pastel Techniques
and
Great Drawings of the Masters.

That night Nail went through the basket Viridis had brought him. It was better than Christmas. He ate an apple and wanted to eat a banana too, but he saved it. He chewed some of the chewing-gum. He opened the books; there were three of them: a clean, revised edition of Dr. Hood, big and thick and fancy-bound, with new chapters he hadn’t read before, on things like unhappy marriages and how to avoid them, how to raise children, and so on; there was a new book called
Tender Buttons
by a lady named Gertrude Stein; and there was a slender little book of poems, called
Irradiations: Sand and Spray,
by John Gould Fletcher. Nail opened it to the flyleaf and read:

To Nail Chism, a brave Arkansawyer,

whose story will take more pages

than this book.

With ineffable admiration,