The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  She called out, “I’m pleased to meet you, Ernest. Nail has told me so much about you.”

  The young man called back, in a voice so much like those she had heard in Newton County, “He’s shore told me a lot about you too.”

  “I want to see your drawings,” she said.

  “Aw, they aint much,” Ernest protested.

  Nail said, “Ernest, give her your drawings.” And to her: “I reckon you couldn’t see ’em too good in the dark, though. He’s done filled up that pad you gave him, front and back every page. It’s time he got him another pad, if you could manage it.”

  “Certainly, I’ll get him one,” Viridis said.

  “Heck,” Ernest said, “I’m due to sit on Ole Sparky myself in just a few more days. I wouldn’t have time to use up a whole new pad.”

  “Could I borrow the one you’ve finished?” she asked him. “To look at in good light?” She wished she could see at least the outline of his form in the dark, but she saw nothing of him.

  His voice said, “Wal, yeah, I reckon, but they shore aint nothin to brag about.”

  At the edge of the sphere of feeble light from the lantern she saw the sudden protrusion of a square thickness that she recognized as the corner of the drawing pad being offered to her. She reached for it, but Sergeant Gorham stayed her hand. “You aint supposed to touch nothing,” he told her.

  “It’s only a sketchbook, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “Search it if you want. There aren’t any secret messages in it.”

  “Jim, hold up that light,” Sergeant Gorham said, and he took the sketch-book, flipped through it, gave it a shake, and then presented it to her. “Looks harmless,” he said.

  “Thank you, Ernest,” she said. “I’ll get it back to you, along with a new-pad. Do you need some more pencils? Erasers?”

  “I thank ye kindly, ma’am,” Ernest said.

  Another square intruded into the lantern’s light, and Nail said, “Mr. Gorham, sir, I’d like her to have this too. It’s just as harmless as that drawing-pad.”

  It was a book. A thick, heavy book. Sergeant Gorham took it and submitted it to the same treatment he’d given the sketchbook. Nothing fell out. It contained no letters or words other than the printed words. The guard gave it to her. He asked Nail, “What’s it for?”

  “It’s just a ole book I’d like her to have. I won’t be needin it no more.”

  “Nail,” she said intently. “I’m going to save you. Ernest too.”

  “Well,” he said, “there’s just a part of that book I thought you might find interestin.”

  “Time’s up, now,” Gorham said, and put his hand on her shoulder. She shivered at the man’s touch.

  “Did you get my letter?” she asked Nail.

  “Yeah, I sure did, and it was wonderful. I reckon you didn’t get mine, but it wasn’t much compared with yours.”

  “You know what I tried hardest to say in that letter?”

  “It’s hard to say,” he acknowledged.

  “I mean it,” she said. “I can’t say it again right here and now, but I mean it. Three words.”

  “Three words,” he returned.

  They took her back upstairs, and she picked up her purse at the warden’s office. She gave T.D. Yeager the sack of cookies and said, “Share these with your wife.”

  “I don’t have a wife, ma’am hee hee, but say, thanks a lot.”

  “I’ll be seeing you again,” she said, and offered him her hand. “And possibly again. Thank you for your kindness.”

  She went home and closed herself in her studio with Ernest’s sketchbook and the book Nail had given her. It had a funny title, Dr. Hood’s Plain Talks and Common Sense Medical Advisor. The book was grimy and smelled mouldy, reminding her of the smells of the death hole, which she would like to forget. It was well worn, as if Nail had read it again and again. Why he wanted her to have this book she wasn’t sure, but she understood one thing: it was probably the only reading matter he’d had, and his giving it to her was as if he were saying he had nothing more to give. She was touched. She flipped idly through it, and did to it what Sergeant Gorham had done: held it with the spine up and the pages flopping down, and flipped it and shook it to see if anything might fall out; nothing did. She leafed slowly through it, looking for a penciled message; there was none. The chapters covered such things as “Sexual Isolation” and “Prevention of Conception” and other matters dealing with love and marriage and childbirth and parenthood. Was he perhaps trying to tell her that this book dealt with a kind of life they could never have together? The pages were dirty and smudged; one even seemed to have a smear of blood on it, beside a definition of “Oil of Mustard,” the significance of which she could not determine. She closed the book, a bit disappointed apart from being moved by his gesture of giving her his last possession.

  Then she held Ernest’s sketchbook beneath the studio’s north light. The afternoon still had an hour to go before the light faded. The first drawing took her breath away. It was a landscape. Surely, it had been drawn from memory, in the poor light and confinement of a prison, but it had the authority and detail of a sketch rendered on the spot, the spot being the middle of a rushing mountain stream, looking upstream toward a tranquil pool overhung with great summer trees, themselves overhung by the crags of bluffs and the ridge of a mountain over which dramatic clouds gathered themselves. His clouds, particularly, were beyond her achievement. Her admiration for the draughtsman’s skill was almost overwhelmed by her envy of it. All in black and white, the drawing yet evoked distinct colors, shade upon shade of green. There were effects here that she simply could not duplicate, try as she might. A native genius she did not possess. She was good, certainly she had skill and long practice, but she did not have…what was it?…she recalled Nail’s words as quoted in the newspapers: “He’s got a talent I could never hope to have: he can draw like an angel, although there’s only one angel I ever saw do a drawing, and she’s not here today, I’m glad to see.”

  As Viridis looked at Ernest’s drawings, she suddenly understood how an angel would draw. But she was not one herself.

  There was one drawing that she did not immediately recognize. After all the landscapes, the interior came as a different place, a confusing scene.

  It took her a moment to shift focus from the outdoors to a room. A room containing a monster. But the monster, she recognized after deliberation, was the machine that was called—what had Ernest called it?—Old Sparky, the electric chair, but not the electric chair as she remembered it. Had Ernest Bodenhammer drawn the picture from memory? Or had he actually seen the chair? No, it seemed to be drawn from imagination, not just the imagination of a highly creative and fertile artist but that of a person inspired by the foreknowledge of his murderous sacrifice to that monster. The chair had a distinct personality, a menace and a malevolence that exceeded the sum of its various straps, panels, wires, and braces. It seemed to be alive and waiting. It carried a threat not just for the artist but for all humanity.

  Almost with relief she turned the page. But the drawing she saw next stunned her. The sketchbook fell from her lap and lay shut on the floor for a long moment before she picked it up and forced herself to open it again. Viridis felt her face growing very hot, and she felt embarrassment as if she were a voyeur standing right beside the bed where the naked couple clenched in a tangle of arms, legs, elbows, knees, at the center of which their genitals seemed to be trying to devour each other. The man was Nail. There was no mistake, although his face was in profile. Nail, with a full head of handsome blond hair disheveled and matted by the sweat from his exertions. The woman…she certainly wasn’t Dorinda Whitter, or anyone else Viridis could recognize, just a typical country girl, an earth goddess, very pretty and very shapely and very passionate. Had Ernest simply “borrowed” Nail for an imagined scene? Or had he re-created an actual event that Nail had described and narrated to him? Viridis was surprised at how grudging she felt; she turned three shades of green, jealous
of whoever the lucky girl had been. And this answered, perhaps, her longstanding question, which she had vaguely worded to Nail’s mother: “Did Nail ever have a girlfriend?” But as she stared in awe at Ernest’s drawing, trying to forget the subject long enough to fully appreciate the draughtsmanship, she realized that it had the unexpected power to arouse her sexually. She was burning.

  Not the Arkansas Gazette but its rival, the Arkansas Democrat, on pages 8 and 9 of the issue of Monday, April 26, 1915, carried Viridis’ story about Ernest Bodenhammer, with two illustrations: a fuzzy photograph of the boy taken about two years before, and a fair reproduction of his masterpiece, “Old Sparky.” This was the first picture of the electric chair that had ever appeared in the pages of the Democrat, whose readership has always been more plebeian and democratic than that of the Gazette. A younger newspaper with an inferiority complex (it was founded at the time of the Mexican War in 1846, whereas the Gazette has been “the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi” since 1819), the Democrat has occasionally resorted to sensationalism, if not outright yellow journalism, in its circulation rivalry, and Tom Fletcher himself suggested that Viridis try the piece on the Democrat, because he and his paper felt that the “Chism case” had already been given maximum exposure and readers were not interested in yet another story of “wrongful electrocution.” In Europe, Germany was making war on Holland and invading Baltic Russia and preparing its submarines to torpedo the Lusitania (the ship Viridis had taken abroad), and the Gazette’s readers were beginning to turn their attention away from small local events to the international crisis and the growing issue of America’s nonintervention, which most Gazette readers supported. Letters to the editor were preponderantly concerned with the war in Europe, and a total of only three letters had been received about the Chism case, two of them demanding to know why the governor didn’t go ahead and pull the switch himself, “like he said he would.”

  Tom Fletcher said to her, “Very, this Bodenhammer piece is a serious mistake. It will only divert the public’s attention from the Chism case.”

  Viridis’ story in the Democrat, which an editor titled GIFTED YOUNG ARTIST MUST GO TO MEET HIS NIGHTMARE, was the only publicity that Ernest Bodenhammer ever received. She was disappointed that the Democrat showed only one of Ernest’s drawings, but, as an editor candidly admitted to her, the typical Democrat reader “didn’t know Rembrandt from Rumpelstiltskin.” Viridis paid to have matted and framed behind glass a dozen of Ernest’s best drawings (omitting of course that one), and tried to find a good place to show them concurrently with the appearance of her Democrat article, but the only place she could hang them was the Little Rock Public Library. She had photoengravings printed of those twelve drawings and mailed them out to her friends at Associated Press, as well as to the men who had come to Nail’s thwarted execution and her party. She sent a special note along with the mailing to the Houston Chronicle man who had proposed to her. But if his newspaper, or any other newspaper in America, used her Bodenhammer story, she never received clippings or heard about it.

  Art, she told herself, is dispensable.

  The same issue of the Democrat that had her Bodenhammer story had a front-page item under the headline GOV. HAYS INCREASES DEATH CHAIR’S PRIVACY, to the effect that the governor and his legal advisors were taking steps to reduce the number of witnesses required for an execution from twelve to six, and to limit strictly the attendance of newspapers. “An execution is not a circus,” the governor was quoted as saying. “An execution must not be a public spectacle. Capital punishment is a remnant of barbarity, but as long as we practice it we must insure that it be done mercifully and with dignity, and this requires that we make it as private as possible, as silent as possible, as inconspicuous as possible.”

  When the Gazette also featured this story, Viridis asked Tom Fletcher, “What do you think he’s up to? You don’t suppose he’ll start having secret executions, do you?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” Tom said. “That word ‘inconspicuous’ bothers me. The message to us is that we have to pool a man…” (he lifted his eyebrows) “…or a woman, and let that one reporter cover the scene for all newspapers and wire services. No more parties.” At her expression of dismay he pointed out, “That’s really not so different from what we had been doing, is it? Weren’t you the only reporter at the execution of that nigra, Skipper Thomas?” When she nodded, he assured her, “We’re supposed to receive notice of all intended executions so that we can arrange with the Democrat and the AP to pool a man. Or a woman. I’ll keep you posted.”

  But Tom’s promise wasn’t enough to make her comfortable. She went to the state capitol and asked to see the governor. This time he did not make her wait all day, but didn’t she understand that, without an appointment, she couldn’t just barge in on him? He apologized for keeping her waiting and offered her coffee, which she declined.

  “And how was your tryst with the moonshiner?” he asked.

  “I don’t appreciate your failure to keep your part of the bargain,” she said.

  “I saved your life probably,” the governor said, and then from the pile of papers atop his desk he lifted the issue of the Democrat that had her story. “And I see you didn’t keep your part of the bargain either.” He slammed the newspaper down on his desk. “That’s a dreadful story, Miss Monday! My telephone hasn’t stopped ringing! The telegrams are piling up! The letters are burying me!”

  “Really?” she asked.

  He laughed, then changed his tone from mock-indignant to coldly informative. “Do you want to know the sum total of public response to your story? Do you want to know how many people I’ve heard from as a result of that piece?” The governor made a show of propping his elbow on his desk top and then rounding his thumb and forefinger into a big 0. “Zero. None. Not a blessed soul.”

  “So you’re going to go ahead and pull the switch on him Saturday night?”

  “That was dramatic oratory on my part. I could never pull the switch on a man myself. Mr. Irvin Bobo is a licensed electrician. I am not.”

  “But this Saturday night?” she said. “Three days from now?”

  He did not respond. Instead he said, “I read your story. I was touched. I was impressed. The boy really is some sort of wizard with a pencil. Not that I know anything about art, but I recognize talent when I see it. I’ve never seen that chair myself, but he sure made it look petrifying, didn’t he? I don’t understand why nobody cares about him. Isn’t that a shame, Miss Monday, that nobody cares?” She glowered at him, not knowing just how sarcastic he was trying to be. “Except you, of course,” he amended. “You care an awful lot. In Ernest Bodenhammer you’ve found the perfect answer to the prayers of a lonely spinster. He’s much better for your purposes than the moonshining rapist. Bodenhammer never raped anybody, except probably his sister and his mother. He’s young and fairly innocent—all he did was kill a fat guard nobody liked anyway—and he’s savable and malleable. You can make him into anything you want him to be, and everybody will live happily ever after…except the wife and children of Gabriel McChristian, the man he murdered.”

  She waited to see if the governor was going to say anything else. She told herself to try very hard to be polite, that the least show of anger would defeat her purpose. She took a calm, deep breath and said, as if it were the only thing she had left to say, “He’s only sixteen.”

  “So? The state of Arkansas has executed murderers of fifteen and even fourteen. Once several years ago we hanged a thirteen-year-old nigra.” The governor began to wave his forefinger back and forth. “But if you’re asking me to show mercy for someone on account of youth, remember that Nail Chism’s victim was only thirteen.”

  Calmly Viridis protested, “She recanted. She’s willing to testify that she lied.”

  The governor picked up his telephone. “Martha, bring me that folder on Dorinda Whitter.” Hanging up, he said, “Double perjury doesn’t equal truth. Which is a fancy way of saying two wrongs never mak
e a right.” The governor’s secretary brought to him a file, which he ostentatiously opened and displayed. “As I told you, I like to do a good bit of investigating of my own, in the interests of justice. I’ve attempted to find out all that I can learn about the victim, her background, her family, et cetera.” The governor held up a small item. “I’ve even got her current report card at Fort Steele Elementary. Not doing so well, is she? Lies a lot to her teachers, doesn’t she? And do you yourself have any suspicion that she may have struck the match that burned the school on April 5th? We know it was arson. But what concerns me more is her riffraff family. The girl’s older brother, one Ike Whitter, was a murderer and ruffian who was executed by lynching, a manifestation of that community spirit and mob violence I keep trying to tell you about, Miss Monday, that has to accept capital punishment as a harsh but civilized answer to problems of justice. But the lynching of Ike Whitter isn’t our topic. Our topic is that this girl, victim though she was, and an especially pitiful victim in view of the perverse, grotesque nature of the sexual crimes against her, is yet a girl of very low intelligence, with backward and inbred lines in a pedigree of coarse animals that even nigras would not consider of the human race. The girl has no sense of truth. She may or may not have lied when she told what Nail Chism did to her, but she is lying her head off when she tries to take it back!”

  Viridis wanted to tell the governor of her trip to Stay More, she wanted to describe her meetings with Simon and Precilla Whitter, Dorinda’s parents, whose poverty was the result not of inbreeding or lack of intelligence but of a series of misfortunes that had plagued Simon Whitter from his birth. But the governor did not have time to listen to her. She was not even here to rehash the “Chism case,” as such. She knew there was nothing else that could be said to George W. Hays to alter his opinion of Nail Chism as a “moonshining rapist.” She asked, “Would you consider postponing Ernest Bodenhammer’s execution for a week or ten days?”