The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  “Now what’s the problem?” the governor asked in a quivering voice.

  “Bobo’s gone to check the dynamo, I guess,” Yeager said.

  They waited and waited, but Bobo did not return. Short Leg was sent to look for him. After a long while Short Leg returned alone. “It sure looks to me like he’s done gone home,” Short Leg said. “He aint anywhere around the powerhouse.” He was shaking his head back and forth. “But he sure did fuck up that dynamo before he left.”

  “Fire him!” the governor said. He turned on the warden. “Goddammit, Yeager, there are going to be some changes made in this institution, and I am going to make them!”

  “I’ve already made a few hee hee,” Yeager protested.

  Off

  One of the first things they did was fire Jimmie Mac. Or, rather, since Jimmie Mac had been just a volunteer to begin with, they replaced him with a paid, nearly full-time chaplain, an honest-to-God man of the cloth, the real Reverend Mr. Lee Tomme, formerly of the Colorado State Correctional System, who started in from his first day on the job correcting everything in the Arkansas system. Whether or not they fired Irvin Bobo, Nail couldn’t find out right away. But one of the first “improvements” that the Reverend Tomme accomplished was getting the prisoners the privilege of reading magazines and newspapers, and just a few days after his third execution was aborted, Nail read an item in the Gazette, NEW ELECTRICIAN HIRED AT PENITENTIARY, which explained that G.H. Dempsey, of Arkadelphia, electrician for the past seven years at the Arkadelphia Milling Company, who had done the wiring at the Little Rock City Hall eight years ago, had been hired to replace Irvin P. Bobo, who was resigning for personal reasons. Near the bottom of the article Mr. Bobo was quoted as saying, “My memory isn’t what it used to be. Sometimes lately people say I did things which I don’t even recall ever having done.” The new electrician, Dempsey, said he would have no objection to electrocuting any man whether that man was black or white. “A switch is a switch,” he said. “It’s all the same to me.”

  A day after that, the next issue of the Gazette was personally delivered to Nail’s cell by the Reverend Tomme, who also offered Nail a cigarette. Nail almost accepted, but he said, “Preacher, I’ve gone this long without smokes, I can go awhile longer. Thank ye just the same. You go ahead and have one if ye want.”

  The Reverend Tomme (it was pronounced “Tommy”) laughed. “I don’t smoke, Brother Chism, but I want you men to be able to have a few pleasures in this life if you are able to obtain them. Look,” and he handed the newspaper to Nail, pointing to an item. “Do you need me to read it for you?”

  “I can read just fine,” Nail said. The headline, a big black one, read: GOV. HAYS DEMANDS SWEEPING CHANGES IN PRISON SYSTEM. There was a smaller headline underneath: APPOINTS PRISON EXPERT AS NEW CHAPLAIN, and below that: WILL APPOINT COMMISSION TO INVESTIGATE CONDITIONS.

  “The best place to start improving this prison is right here,” the Reverend Tomme said, pointing at the dirt floor of Nail’s cell. “The best person’s condition to change is yours. I’m going to see if we can’t find you a job upstairs.”

  “My God!” Nail exclaimed. He knew there was a law against requiring—or even permitting—condemned men to work.

  “Yes, your God,” the Reverend Tomme said, and smiled. “I’d like to think it’s my God too, but I’ll settle for your God.”

  Nail studied the minister. He had a pleasant face, not that of a man who couldn’t take a joke. He wasn’t much older than Nail, maybe thirty at most. Nail said, “My God is a Lady.” He waited to see if this man would be different from Jimmie Mac.

  The man didn’t blink. “A beautiful One, I’ll bet,” the Reverend Tomme said. “And She must really love you. That God in Her goodness saved you three times from the electric chair. Would you tell me your thoughts about that?”

  “Thoughts?” said Nail. “I think it’s jist wonderful.”

  “Can you tell me what it’s like,” the minister requested, “to sit there one minute and think your life is over, and in the next minute to know that you’ll live? I really can’t imagine being in that chair. Nobody who has never been through that terrible experience could possibly imagine it. And nobody but you, Brother Chism, has ever cheated death three times.”

  “Well, sir,” Nail began, and found himself becoming more talkative than he’d ever been in his life. He’d waited a long time to have somebody to tell it to. He would have liked to tell it to Viridis, but he never got a chance. He hadn’t wanted to tell it to Ernest. Now Nail talked for a solid hour to the preacher. The preacher had a very lively face: he would smile or frown or scowl or laugh or just look like he understood completely what Nail was saying.

  The preacher would sometimes say, “I see,” as if he really did, or “Go on,” as if he really enjoyed listening, or “Is that right?” or “No!” or “Yes yes,” or whatever was required by what Nail was saying, but he didn’t interrupt with any real comment until Nail was finished, and then observed, “It looks to me as if God in His wisdom—Her wisdom, I’m sorry—has got something for you to do in this life that She wants to preserve you for, keep you for, let you do.”

  Nail smiled. “All I want to do, Reverend, is raise my sheep and watch after ’em as best I know how.”

  “That’s just what our friend Jesus once said,” Lee Tomme observed. “‘I am the good shepherd,’ he said; ‘the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.’ You’ve come close three times to giving your life, but Jesus, or God the Mother if you think that way, has saved you from death because He or She, or both of them as One, has been put to death and knows what it’s like and doesn’t want you to have it, not just yet.”

  “That’s fine spoke, Reverend,” Nail said.

  “Will you call me Lee?” he asked. “Just Lee. And I’ll call you Nail? Good. We have much work to do.”

  “I aint had any work to do,” Nail observed. “That’s been my main problem. The whole time I’ve been in this prison, they’ve never given me a chance to do a lick of work.”

  Lee shook his head in sympathy. “It’s an idiotic law that says a man condemned to die cannot be made to work, or even allowed to work. But that’s their law, and I can only try to change it. Nail, would you tell me anything else you don’t like about this place?”

  Nail laughed. “Have you got all day?”

  “I’ve got all day,” Lee said, “and all night too, if need be.”

  The Reverend Mr. Lee Tomme did not spend the entire day and night with Nail Chism, but he stayed past suppertime and insisted on eating supper with Nail, the same cornbread and cowpeas. A couple of days later there was a front-page article in the Gazette, NEW PRISON CHAPLAIN BLASTS CONDITIONS.

  “The food is not fit to eat, the living conditions are unhealthy beyond belief, and the unprovoked punishment is a hideous infliction of unspeakable pain,” the Reverend Mr. Tomme was quoted as saying. “It is the same story at Tucker, the white men’s prison farm, and at Cummins, the farm for black men and women. The whole prison system in the state of Arkansas is begging for change, and we are going to change it, even if we have to abolish the machine politician!

  “Our prison system is at least fifty years behind the national standard, which is bad enough. The penitentiary and the farms are not self-sustaining, when they easily could be. The only mode of punishment known to the keepers, for any violation, real or imagined, of the rules, real or imagined, is the strap. And a terrible strap it is, which beggars description, although I intend to describe it if it is not immediately abolished.

  “There is no self-respecting poor dirt farmer in the state of Arkansas who would permit his animals to dwell in the filth and the horror that surround these human beings, or who would flay them as these men are flayed. There are fewer deaths from natural causes than from preventable disease and from this corporal punishment which is in fact an illegal form of capital punishment.

  “Where does the blame lie? The guards are only doing what they think is expected of
them. The new superintendent, Warden Yeager, is an experienced penal administrator who is open to change, experiment, and improvement. The governor…ladies and gentlemen, I would not have the freedom to make these criticisms if the governor had not appointed me pastor to the poor oppressed captives.

  “Who, then, is to blame? You are. And I am. Any one of us who learns of the brutal injustices of this system and does not act to stop them is in collusion with them! Let us put a stop to them now.”

  The very next day, Fat Gill escorted Nail upstairs into the engine room of the powerhouse and interrupted a big fellow almost as tall as Nail but thicker-muscled, who looked as if he could eat Fat Gill for breakfast and want a second helping. “Here he is,” said Fat Gill.

  “Take the cuffs off,” the man said.

  “But he’s dangerous,” Fat Gill said.

  “Shit. He won’t hurt me. Take the cuffs off and get out of here.” Fat Gill obeyed. As soon as the guard was gone, the big fellow offered Nail a cigarette, and when Nail declined, he offered him a swig from a pint bottle, which Nail knew he could not successfully decline, so he made no attempt. While he was wiping his mouth with one hand, the big man grabbed his other hand and shook it, and said, “I’m Guy Dempsey, and one of these days I’m gonna burn your ass, but meanwhile you’re gonna be my helper. You know anything about electricity?”

  Nail shook his head. “The closest I come to learnin anything was when the feller who had your job let his hand slip and gave me a little charge before I was supposed to get the full dose.”

  “Okay, here’s where we start,” Dempsey said. “Pay close attention, and they might even name something after you. They named the volt after a guy named Count Volta, they named the watt after James Watt, they named the ohm after a German physicist, and they named the ampere after André Ampère. They might decide to call the dose it takes to electrocute a man a chism. Unless you invent something better. Pay attention.”

  Beginning that day, and continuing every day afterward, G.H. Dempsey taught Nail Chism everything he knew about electrostatics, electrodynamics, and electromagnetics. At the end of that first day, Dempsey gave him a copy of Rowland’s Applied Electricity for Practical Men and told him to memorize it. It wasn’t nearly as thick as Dr. Hood, but it was twice as difficult. Thinking of Dr. Hood, Nail wondered if Viridis had ever noticed the “message,” such as it was, that he had tried to smuggle out to her in Dr. Hood, wherein, on the page defining mustard oil, he had used his own blood to underline the definition. It wasn’t fair of him, he realized, to have expected her to figure out what that meant. Even if she saw the smear of blood and read the definition, she wouldn’t know that he was asking her to smuggle some mustard oil in to him.

  He didn’t have to wait for the morning light to read the Rowland book. Now he could read anytime because Dempsey had wired and illuminated the dungeon of the death hole, thanks to Warden Yeager, who had also put Ernest to work painting the walls of it. The job took him only a week, but he was allowed outside his cell all day in order to do it. That freedom and employment were a rare novelty to him, so Ernest happily painted while Nail did odd jobs upstairs in the engine room and took in Dempsey’s lectures and demonstrations on electricity. Sometimes Dempsey had Nail come with him to the main building to do a job, or up to the guard towers to work on the new searchlights. Once Dempsey even took him into the warden’s house outside The Walls to repair some wiring, and Nail reflected that he could have gained his freedom if he had overpowered Dempsey, something he didn’t want to try. In the evenings Nail read Rowland while Ernest drew pictures with his new art kit. The ladies of the Arkansas Federation of Women’s Clubs had put together for Ernest a box containing every conceivable type of artist’s pencil, crayon, chalk, and a set of forty-eight colored pastels, including six shades of green: emerald, moss, olive, viridian, terre verte, and Paris; and he had enough paper, he told Nail, to wallpaper his cell, which he just might do if they didn’t electrocute him soon.

  Afer a week of this decent treatment, Warden Yeager himself came down into the death hole one Saturday morning and passed inspection on the new paint job, and then said, “Well, gentlemen, can I do anything else for you?”

  “I want another one of them steaks,” Ernest said.

  “Yeah, and some more chicken’n dumplins,” Nail said.

  “Hee hee, hee hee,” Yeager said. “Aint we been feeding y’all a little bit better lately?”

  It was true. There wasn’t any steak or dumplings, but the monotonous cornbread and cowpeas had been replaced by an occasional egg at breakfast, a sandwich at dinner, and a square meal at supper: hash or stew sometimes. They really couldn’t complain about that. “We’re happy, I reckon,” Nail declared. “I only wish you’d change that rule about not lettin us ever go to the visit room.”

  “My goodness!” Yeager exclaimed. “I forgot about that. You haven’t seen the visit room lately, have you, Chism? Come up and take a look.” The warden himself, but with some help from Short Leg, escorted Nail upstairs, out across the Yard and into the visitors’ room, where a few changes had been made: the dense screen had been torn out and replaced with a long table divided by a vertical board down the center of it, with chairs placed along both sides so that the inmates could sit on one side, the visitors on the other. And the table could accommodate up to six inmates and six visitors at a time, not just one of each. Two couples were using it at the moment: a black woman with her child was talking to a black convict, and a white woman was talking to a man Nail recognized as his old bunkmate Toy, who had such bad breath. The warden explained that they weren’t allowed to pass anything across the board or touch or hold hands or anything like that, although one kiss at the beginning and one at the end were permitted. “If it’s somebody you care to kiss hee hee,” Yeager said. Nail wondered how the woman could stand to kiss Toy. And there were several other good improvements in the room: a visitor could bring you something, a present or some food or anything, so long as it got inspected first for anything illegal, and you could have a visitor not just once a month but once a week if you wanted.

  “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 t
oo, 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?”