“Why?”
“I’d like to get an expert from a New York art museum to testify that Ernest’s drawings are the work of a creative genius whose life must be spared.”
“Testify to whom? To the state Supreme Court? They have already considered and rejected the automatic appeal that all capital cases must have. Testify to me? I’ve already told you, I consider Bodenhammer a creative genius. Testify to the people of Arkansas? Your New York expert would have to do more than testify. And you don’t believe he could turn the people of Arkansas into connoisseurs of art in a week or ten days, do you?”
She clutched at a straw: “Governor, if you consider him a genius yourself, why couldn’t you commute his sentence to life imprisonment so that he could go on making his drawings, even in prison? That would surely be preferable to breaking his pencil forever.”
The governor shook his head. “If I did that, we would never again be able to hire a prison guard. This state must have a hidebound law that the killing of a law enforcement officer is automatically punishable by death. Otherwise, we wouldn’t even be able to keep the policemen we’ve got.”
Viridis felt her eyes beginning to get wet. While she could still see clearly through them, she looked at the paintings hanging on the walls of the governor’s office, portraits of his predecessors, some of the state’s more enlightened governors, such as Donaghey and Robinson and even the demagogue Jeff Davis. Her glance fell upon one portrait she recognized because of the clear family resemblance: Jacob Ingledew of Stay More. None of the portraits was a skillful painting. Each of them, by a different artist, was sloppy in brushstroke, muddy in color, unperceptive in interpretation of character. Her hand idly swept them. “Just to think,” she said, “someday Ernest Bodenhammer might have been the very artist to do your portrait to hang on that wall, and he would have made you look much better than all of them.”
His eyes, following her hand, gazed upon the clumsy likenesses of his precursors and seemed to reflect a mingling of veneration for their subjects’ high position in history and a distaste for their second-rate execution by the semiskilled portraitists. He studied the portraits for a while, even swiveling his chair around so he could contemplate them. Was he trying to imagine his own image up there someday? At length he swiveled his chair back to face her, leaned across his desk with his arms upon it, and said to her, “You really love Ernest Bodenhammer, don’t you?”
She would not deny it. “I really love Ernest Bodenhammer.”
“And you really love Nail Chism, don’t you?”
As if intoning a litany, she said, “I really love Nail Chism.”
The governor stood up. Respectfully or politely she stood too, wondering if he was not going to say anything further. But he did: “Miss Monday, I’d like for you to put yourself in my place. No, I’m going to do it for you: I’m going to put you in my place. As of this moment, I hereby authorize you, by executive order, to determine which one of the two men shall live, Nail Chism or Ernest Bodenhammer. Decide.”
It was almost as if he had struck her, and it took her a moment to recover from the blow. Her first reaction was to say, “You can’t be serious.”
“Oh, but I am. I am dead serious. Aren’t you already beginning to feel the awesome responsibility that bears down on me? I am shifting that burden to you. You make that choice. The State decrees that both of them must die. There is no way on this earth that you, or I, or anybody, can save both of them. The State—call it public opinion if you will—would not allow it. But you may save one of them; just decide which one.”
“You are simply trying to make a point,” she declared. “You wouldn’t let me do that, any more than you would let me enter Nail’s cell and stay with him.”
“I give you my solemn word of honor, Miss Monday. The choice is yours.”
“It isn’t fair!” she cried out.
“No, it certainly isn’t!” he cried back at her. “But people ask me to make that kind of decision every day of my life! It’s grossly unfair!”
For a moment she did understand, and she did feel some sympathy for the governor. It was a terrifying dilemma. But now, if he was playing a game with her to prove his point, could she meet the challenge? She thought of Solomon sitting in judgment on the two prostitutes arguing over a baby, and Solomon’s determining the true mother by proposing to slice the baby in two. Could she find a Solomonic solution to this problem?
“Well?” the governor said at length, after waiting for her response. “Give me your decision, and I’ll have Martha come in here and draw up the executive order commuting the death sentence to life imprisonment for the man of your choice.”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t do it. Not right now. I would have to think about it.”
“They don’t give me time to think,” the governor protested. “Oftentimes I have to make a judgment right on the spot.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Don’t you realize I would have to live with the decision all the rest of my life?”
“And don’t you, my dear, realize that all of my many decisions will haunt me the rest of mine?”
She turned as if to flee. She turned back. She turned again. “Could I have a couple of days? The execution is Saturday night?”
He nodded, to both questions. His last words to her were: “Unless you decide, both executions are Saturday night. We’ll have a doubleheader.”
His allusion to a sporting event did not escape her. There actually was a doubleheader baseball game on the afternoon of Saturday, May 1st, between the Little Rock Travelers and the Memphis Chicks, and that is where she found Mr. Irvin Bobo. The landlady of the rooming house where Bobo lived, on Asher Avenue within walking distance of the Arkansas State Penitentiary, told her that she would find him at the ballgame. And that was where he was.
Saturday morning, May 1st, she got up before five, when the first light of dawn came into her room. She had slept no better than the previous three nights and felt weary to the bone. She drank a pot of coffee and went outside and soaked her face in the morning dew, then went for a long walk up Arch Street past the Mt. Holly Cemetery, all the way to the beginning of Arch Street Pike, a road that ran to Malvern, her grandparents’ home, forty miles away. If she had had Rosabone beneath her, she would have fled into the countryside and never come back. But she was on foot and had to make a very simple decision governing her simple walk: she could have turned west on to the Hot Springs road that led to the penitentiary, but she turned east and walked seven or eight blocks to Cumberland Street, then turned back north, toward town. Throughout her hike many dogs barked at her. A milkman stopped his wagon alongside her and asked if she was all right. The sun was well up in the sky when her feet began to fail her, and she stopped at a small café on Third and Cumberland that had just opened for the day. She ordered breakfast and read the Gazette: there was a page 3 item, LITTLE HOPE FOR TWO MEN FACING SUNDOWN DEATH, and a subhead, EXECUTIVE SAYS HE WILL NOT INTERVENE WITHOUT ‘DIVINE INTERCESSION.’ Viridis asked herself, Am I “little hope,” or am I “divine intercession”? but the answer remained stubbornly absent.
She read the entire issue of the Gazette, every one of its features: the significance of May, the fact that Robin Hood had died on May 1st, for whatever that was worth, the fact that in medieval and Tudor England everybody got up with the dawn and went “a-maying.” Am I going a-maying? she wondered. Yes, in a way she was.
At Kavanaugh Park, the same park containing the baseball diamond where she would later find Irvin Bobo, one thousand girls of the Little Rock schools, Dorinda Whitter among them, staged an elaborate maypole winding for an audience of two thousand, Viridis among them. While the girls of the grammar schools continuously wound and unwound twelve poles with long ribbons, the older girls from the high school performed dances: the girls of the Thalian Literary Society gave the weavers’ dance, the Red Domino girls did the Dance of the Roses, the Ossolean Literary Society did a Dutch dance, the junior-class girls did Spanish and India
n dances, and the girls of the “As You Like It” Society performed the Dance of the Foresters. When it was all over, Viridis managed to find Dorinda in the crowd and congratulate her on her pole-winding, and tell her that she was going to a baseball game and wouldn’t be home until after dark.
“I never knew you keered fer baseball,” Dorinda said. “Kin I come too?”
But Viridis explained that she had to meet some people there to discuss business. Dorinda rode home with the friends who had brought her.
The Little Rock Travelers, cellar-dwellers in the Southern Association, were losing to the Memphis Chicks at Travelers Field in Kavanaugh Park, and there were only about three hundred in the bleachers, so she spotted Irvin Bobo without much difficulty, sitting by himself behind first base. There weren’t many women there at all, a few wives, and thus Irvin Bobo was surprised when she sat down beside him. He had swapped the familiar, grimy felt bowler he’d worn at all the executions for a more seasonal straw hat, but this one also had the band and crown stained with much sweat, and beneath it he wore the same green celluloid eyeshade he apparently slept in. Up close, in the sunlight, she saw that his dark, Chaplinesque mustache was stained yellow-brown by cigarette smoke. She had never seen his eyes before. Had anyone? They were tiny and dull and empty.
“My goodness,” she exclaimed. “Aren’t you Irvin Bobo?”
He looked her up and down. “Do I know you?”
“Why, yes!” she cooed. “I’m the star reporter of the Gazette, and I’ve been to almost every one of your jobs.” She laughed gaily. “‘Jobs’ isn’t the right word, is it?”
He was looking at her closely, and his tiny old eyes in their green shadow showed a spark of recognition. “Yeah, I ’member you! You was that lady jumped up and give me trouble when I was doing my duty on that white man.”
She resisted the impulse to explain to him that he hadn’t exactly been doing his duty when she had given him trouble. “Yes, you scared me,” she confessed. “I thought you were supposed to wait until the warden got back, and you went ahead and pulled the switch. I didn’t realize you were just kidding. Looking back now, I have to laugh.” She did have to laugh, and she laughed, and then she opened her large handbag and took out the quart bottle of James E. Pepper bourbon, wrapped in brown paper. “Remember you offered me a drink?” she asked him. “Well, now I’m going to return the favor.”
“Here’s the pitch,” Bobo told her and directed her eyes toward the field, where a man was winding up his body into a leg-lifted dance. The man threw the ball, and Bobo stood up, yelling, “That was a clean strike, goddammit! ’scuse me.”
She stood alongside him. He was actually shorter than her. “A clean strike, goddammit,” she agreed.
They sat down, and she began unscrewing the cap on the bottle. Irvin Bobo was looking around to see if any neighbors were watching. “We aint supposed to drink in the ballpark,” he informed her. “And I don’t drink anyhow except before I have to do a job.”
“You’ve got two jobs to do tonight,” she reminded him. She brought out of her handbag two small metal jiggers and demonstrated how it was possible to hold and drink one inconspicuously.
In the course of the afternoon Viridis measured out nearly the whole quart of bourbon to Irvin Bobo, retaining only enough in her own jigger to give the semblance of conviviality. She even learned a few things about baseball: the manager has to decide whether to leave a pitcher in even if the pitcher is getting killed.
In the second game of the doubleheader Irvin Bobo began to lose interest, although the Travelers were winning. He tried to watch the field with one eye closed and then the other, but he could not see the field clearly. All he could see was the jigger in his hand, which she kept full. “You called me a monster,” he mumbled.
She asked him what he had said, and he mumbled it again, and she recalled having said that. She patted his knee and left her hand there while she apologized. “I didn’t mean you. I meant that awful boss of yours, Warden Burdell.”
“Yeah, now he was a monster,” Bobo agreed.
“He shouldn’t have tried to make you kill a white man,” she sympathized. “That wasn’t fair.”
“No, it sure wudn’t. Burdell was a bastud.”
“He’s gone,” she reminded him. “Yeager won’t make you kill a white man.”
Irvin Bobo made a sound that, she guessed, was the best approximation of a laugh he could manage. “I gotta choose who they tell me to choose,” he said, or she thought he said, not hearing him clearly. Thinking about his words, she realized that he had not said “choose” but “juice.” I gotta choose who they tell me to choose, she told herself.
The Travelers won the second game of the doubleheader, but Irvin Bobo was past cheering. He was even, she discovered, past standing. She had to hold him up. She hoped he had not driven to the ballpark; he had not, and intended to walk home. It wasn’t far. Less than a mile. She offered to get a taxicab. He insisted on walking, but he fell down twice before he could get out of the park. She helped him up, dusted him off, called a taxicab, and took him home.
“Did anyone ever tell you that you look just like Charlie Chaplin?” she asked him.
“Who?” he asked, but she did not repeat herself. She realized he had never been to the movies.
In his room she offered to prepare some supper for him, but he said he wasn’t hungry, he’d just like another little drink if she had any left, and if she didn’t he had a pint somewhere around here. She told him that if he drank any more, he wouldn’t be able to walk to the penitentiary, even though it was only a short distance down the road. He would have to eat something. In his cupboard she found a loaf of bread and a bologna sausage, which she sliced, and made three sandwiches, two for him, one for herself. She considered making coffee but then decided she didn’t want him any more sober than he was now.
Making conversation to keep him paying attention, she asked, “How much do they pay you for a job?”
“Fiff dahs,” he said.
“Only five?” she said.
“Fiffy,” he said. “Fiffy dahs.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s a lot. Tonight you’ll make a hundred dollars.”
“Doanwannit,” he insisted. “Doanwannit.”
She had to use the bathroom. When she returned, he was sitting on the edge of his bed, tilting up a pint bottle of his own whiskey and letting it run down his throat. “Hey!” she said, and moved to stop him. “You’ve had enough of that, now. You won’t be able to walk to work.”
“Doanwanna. Doanwanna.” He groaned these sounds, then he fell over on the bed and passed out. She shook him, and shook him harder, but could not rouse him. She glanced at the clock on the table. It was almost five. Two hours to sundown. Probably, the executioner was expected to be on the job half an hour before. She made a pot of coffee but couldn’t get him to wake up and drink it. She drank some herself.
She sat on the edge of the bed beside his flopped-out body, thinking. In all truth, in all veritas, Viridis Monday was no closer to a decision than when she had walked out of the governor’s office. She sat on the bed of Irvin Bobo until she had determined he probably would sleep a long time. Then she knew what she had to do.
On
He protested when they tried to shave him again. Hell, it had only been ten days since they’d shaved him last, and he’d hardly had time to regrow anything but peach fuzz. He didn’t mind so much being made bald as a doorknob for the third time, but he hated the goddamn trusty-barber, who couldn’t hold his hand steady enough to keep from slashing his scalp. The barber had done a bad job on Ernest, Nail could tell just by listening. Ernest hadn’t liked it at all. The kid wasn’t the least bit vain about his mop of red hair, and he had surprised Nail with his ideas about facing death calmly because we all have to go sooner or later, but he yelled at Fat Gill, “I been a-cuttin my own hair since I was five year old, and aint nobody else never touched it! Give me that there razor, and I’ll do it myself!” Fat Gill had
guffawed at the thought that they’d be dumb enough to let the boy get hold of the razor. Nail, listening, had determined that Fat Gill and Short Leg were both required to hold Ernest down while the barber shaved him. They wouldn’t have to hold Ernest when they put him in Old Sparky…not unless they did Nail first and made Ernest watch, and if they did that, Ernest might easily get mad or scared and start fighting. Nobody would tell them which one was going first. Maybe they’d flip a coin at the last minute. Nail hoped that he could go last, simply because he had enough experience to bear watching Ernest get it, in a way that wouldn’t be so the other way around. But try explaining this to anybody. Of course there was always a chance that Viridis had got all of those newspapermen to come back again, but Nail doubted it. He had spent a good bit of time trying to imagine how Viridis might save him this time, but he hadn’t been able to come up with a single blessèd notion, although he wouldn’t put any thing past her: she might even set fire to the whole penitentiary to stop them. He was a little surprised at himself for being so inwardly calm, so resigned; it wasn’t because he had any hope of once again being saved at the last minute but because he knew he would not be, and the only way to take it, this time, was to accept what Ernest had been preaching at him for several days now: “We ort not to fear nothin, not even that black thing they call death. Me and you will jist not be no more, but the whole world won’t be neither. It will go with us, Nail. The whole world will die when we die, don’t ye see? But it has to die sooner or later, I reckon, just as we’uns all do, so one time is about as good as another. That’s all time is. One time is as good as another.” The twelve witnesses, whoever they were this time, were sure going to be surprised to see both of them going to the chair so calmly. If the twelve witnesses were expecting any excitement from either one of them, they were going to be in for a letdown.
But there weren’t going to be twelve witnesses, or even nine. When the head-shaving was finished, the new warden himself came down into the death hole. Yeager had impressed Nail as just maybe a little bit nicer than Burdell, although Nail knew that any man who had been the boss at Tucker Farm had to be plenty tough, or else numbskulled, and Nail hadn’t seen enough of him to know which. Now Yeager was saying, “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” and Nail couldn’t tell whether he was saying “gentlemen” politely and friendly-like or just being sarcastic.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 180
