The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  “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 lett
er,” 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,

  John Gould Fletcher

  Beneath the fancy ink of that inscription there was written in pencil in Viridis’ hand: “He is the cousin of my ex-boss, and grew up in Little Rock, lives now in London, but has read all the newspaper stories about you, and thinks the world of you.” Beneath that in blacker pencil someone had block-printed: WRITING STUFF IN BOOKS IS AGAINST RULES OF THIS PRISON.

  Nail had been required by his teacher at the Stay More school to read poetry, but he hadn’t particularly cared for it or had time for it. Now that he had a lot of time, he read Mr. Fletcher’s verse cover to back, and then back to cover. There weren’t any rhymes in it, and Mr. Fletcher seemed to get overexcited at times, but he had a good way of putting things, and Nail understood what he was saying. There was one long poem, called “Green Symphony,” that was mostly about trees, and Nail appreciated such lines as:

  The trees splash the sky with their fingers,

  A restless green rout of stars.

  and:

  The trees lash the sky with their leaves,

  Uneasily shaking their dark green manes.

  A good poem, Nail reflected, ought to make you want to see it yourself, and he wanted to see those trees…or any trees. That time Dempsey had taken him to fix the wiring in the warden’s house, Nail had glimpsed the trees on the warden’s lawn, the first he had seen for eight months.

  He wanted to watch some trees somewhere splashing the sky with their fingers and shaking their dark-green manes.

  Since the painting of the death hole was all finished, they had Ernest build four more cells. They gave him the cement and the concrete blocks and the tools and finally brought him four ready-made barred doors, and all by himself Ernest built four more death cells, each of them only four feet wide by seven feet deep, and he painted those too, making a total of six cells for the death hole, and pretty soon three of the new cells were filled: there was Sam Bell, who had been convicted of killing four members of his divorced wife’s family; and, briefly, two black men who had been convicted of killing their bosses, but they hardly stayed long enough for Nail to learn their names before the governor commuted them to life imprisonment and sent them to Cummins in order to make room for Clarence Dewein and Joe Short, two young white men not much older than Ernest, who had killed a storekeeper together, or one of them had done the shooting while the other robbed the man. The population of the death hole was five. There would have been even more than that, according to the Gazette, except for all the publicity about Nail, which had made juries all over the state reluctant to send men to the electric chair, exercising instead their new option for sentences of life imprisonment.

  Warden Yeager summoned Nail to his office, had Short Leg unlock the handcuffs, and offered Nail a cigarette, which he declined. “Gettin kind of crowded down there, aint it hee hee?” the warden observed or asked.

  “Yessir,” Nail agreed. “I don’t think that hole was meant to hold that many.”

  “But we don’t keep you down there. You doin a good job upstairs with Dempsey, I hear hee hee. A good job, he tells me. Learnin a lot.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Are you happy, Chism?” the warden asked. “Is there anything we could do for you?”

  Nail thought. “Well, sir,” he said, “you know that empty piece of the Yard on the east side of the powerhouse? Could I put me a mater patch in it?”

  “A mater patch?” the warden asked.

  “Yeah, and grow…to-maters? It’s a shame to let a piece of land jist go to waste out there in the Yard, that the men don’t walk on or nothin.

  “I could grow enough maters on that piece to feed the prison, come August and September, if you could git me the plants.”

  “Well, why not?” the warden said. “I’ll get some niggers out there to spade it up for you. You need some fertilizer too. That’s a good idea. How many plants you need?”

  “I reckon fifty or so ought to be all it could hold.”

  “We’ll sure do it, then, Chism. Would that make you happy?”

  “It would help.”

  They gave Nail his tomato patch. It was really late in the year to be planting tomatoes, but the plants the warden got were kind of old and leggy anyhow, and Nail planted them deep. While Nail was cultivating them one afternoon, the warden came out there with three other fellows, all of them dressed in suits with straw hats. Nail was wearing a straw hat too, but it wasn’t fancy, and he took it off. One of the men was a black man, and he was dressed the best. The only one Nail recognized was that local sheriff who had arrested Ernest and had come with the governor to his last execution.

  “Chism,” the warden said, “these here are some gentlemen would like to talk to you. This is Mr. George Donaghey, who used to be our governor, and this is the Reverend Dr. Alonzo Monk of the AME church, and I believe you’ve met Sheriff Bill Hutton. Now these men are gonna ask you some questions. Governor Hays has appointed them a commission to inspect and investigate the prison, and I want you to tell ’em just what you think, okay?”

  The three men of the governor’s commission stood around in Nail’s tomato patch and asked him all kinds of questions about life in the prison. Warden Yeager stood there smiling, and his smile got bigger whenever Nail told how much things had changed lately, and how much better the food was, and all.

  “Mr. Chism,” said Governor Donaghey, “you have been, and still are, under sentence of death. Don’t you think it’s remarkable that you’re allowed out here on the grounds to work in this garden?”

  “Yessir, I reckon it is,” Nail replied.

  “Do yo
u know the Reverend Lee Tomme?”

  “I’ve met ’im.”

  “Do you think there is any substance to the charges he has made against this prison?”

  “Well, sir, there was. Things was pretty bad around here before he spoke up. Of course, Warden Yeager was already doin his best to make ’em better, before the Reverend come along.”

  Later that afternoon, after supper (everybody got chicken and dumplings), the warden provided a little entertainment for the visiting inspectors: he turned Ernest loose. Nail didn’t see it happen, but later Ernest told him about it. First thing, of course, they told Ernest that he would be pursued…and caught. They gave him a couple of extra pairs of pants (as protection, they said, but possibly also to impede his running) and opened the gate of The Walls and told him to take off, not toward the city but southward toward the swamp out behind the pen. They gave him a half-hour head start, and then, for the benefit of Governor Donaghey, the Reverend Monk, and Sheriff Hutton, they pursued him with the warden’s pack of bloodhounds: Driver, Slim, Gloom, Dopey, Fetch, Nosey, and Lady. They had suggested the location of some telephone poles that Ernest could climb to get out of reach of the dogs’ teeth, but he chose instead a sycamore tree beyond the swamp, a mile out, which was the farthest he could get before the hounds caught up with him, and he was returned, unharmed and unbitten, to the inspectors. The whole business was designed to prove how difficult it was to escape, and every inmate was told about it.

  After dark, Nail was called out to help Guy Dempsey give the inspectors the “lighting ceremony,” as Dempsey called it: a new searchlight had been mounted on a motorized swivel atop each of the four guard towers so that the guards could focus them on any spot inside the grounds or within a half-mile radius outside the grounds, and nothing within the reach of those lights remained in darkness. A half-dozen black trusties, dressed in prison stripes, were turned loose on the understanding that they would voluntarily come back after this demonstration. Apparently, the inspectors were greatly impressed and told the warden they would report that it was impossible, between the dogs and the lights, to escape from The Walls.