The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  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, God!”

  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 petition, 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 bitch!” 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 godsakes, 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 shore 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 shore 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?”

  Bir
d 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.

  “Goddammit! 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 pass, 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 appetite, 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 appetites 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 snatch 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 brass 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 Gode 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 Gode’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 shit is still shit.” 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 appetites 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 no
ticed 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 brass-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.