But he denied everything. That cowpath, he said, was the way he used every afternoon to get from his sheep pastures up on Ledbetter Mountain down into the village. Every afternoon this time of year, when the weather was nice, he’d go down to the Ingledew store and sit on the porch with the other fellers, whittling and spitting, just passing the time, you know, and watching the world go by, and swapping dogs and knives and tales, they’ve been doing that in Stay More ever since there was a storeporch to set on. He had gone straight from his sheep pasture down to Ingledew’s, and sure he had seen the two girls, Dorinda Whitter and Latha Bourne, on that cowpath, and to the best of his recollection he had said howdy to them and gone on. He sure had not doubled back and waited to rape Dorinda. That was a baldface lie, and he didn’t know why a sweet young girl like her would make up such a story, or, if she wasn’t making it up, why she’d try to put the blame on him. She didn’t have anything against him, now, did she?
“Not before,” said Mr. Thurl Bean, and then he said, “Mr. Chism, let me ast ye a question: do you lak women?”
“What-all kind of question is that?” Nail wanted to know.
“Answer it. Do ye or don’t ye?”
“Why, shore, same as the next feller,” Nail replied.
“Maybe more’n the next feller,” Mr. Bean put in. “You bein a bachelor-feller and unmarried and all. Would ye say that you’ve got a normal desire for the fair sex? Don’t ye git to feelin some passion ever wunst in a while?” Nail just stared at him, not knowing how to reply. “Or is it true,” Mr. Bean said, “that you have been known to obtain carnal gratification from one of yore sheep, now and again?”
“Objection!” said Jim Tom Duckworth, and he began to holler that the prosecuting attorney had better watch his mouth and not go imputing imputations against his client that were not substantiated by bonafide facts, and that maybe those folks over around Mt. Judea got their jollies from screwing ewes, but Stay More people had better sense, not to mention taste.
The judge, or magistrate (he wasn’t Judge Villines, our circuit judge, but just a J.P.), had to pound his gavel for order, and then he sustained Jim Tom’s objection and instructed the prosecutor to make an effort to stick to the facts.
Mr. Thurl Bean eventually gave up trying to prove that Nail Chism was a sex maniac, and asked Nail if it was not true that he had publicly accosted Judge Sewell Jerram yonder right here in the halls of this seat of justice and told said Judge Jerram to leave his said girlfriend Dorinda alone.
“I never called her my girlfriend,” Nail said.
“But you tole said Judge Jerram yonder to leave her alone.”
“Yeah, ’cause he’s married to my sister and hadn’t no business foolin around with Dorinda.”
“Or maybe ye was jist jealous,” Mr. Bean said, and without giving Nail a chance to deny it he turned and said, “Thar you are, grand gents of the jury, thar is yore motive: Nail Chism was sweet on that gal, he was green as a gourd with jealousy, and he let it be known, and then he went and done that vile abomination unto her.”
Jim Tom Duckworth called as witnesses the men who gathered every afternoon on Ingledew’s storeporch, one of whom, Fentrick Bullen, testified, “I could set my watch by the minute that ole Nail comes down to the store of an evenin, and he was right on time. He never had no dalliance.”
One by one the sitters of the storeporch, fifteen in number, testified that Nail Chism had arrived at the store at exactly his usual time. But the grand jury voted, ten to nine, with four abstentions (two drunk, two asleep), to indict Nail Chism for sodomy, perversion, assault, battery, and sexual violation of a female beneath the age of consent and against her will. Trial was set for August.
The next time I saw Dorinda was not at our playhouse (we never went there again, at least not together) but on the front porch of my house, one afternoon when she came over, bringing with her the 1914 Sears, Roebuck and Company Consumer’s Guide, which had been loaned to her by somebody in Jasper. She said she wanted my help in picking out a couple of dresses and a pair of shoes. It wasn’t play-like picking either, not the kind of wishing I did whenever I could see one of those catalogs. She had ten dollars actual cash money. I’d never seen that much real money in my entire life.
“Where did you git it, Rindy?” I inquired.
“They gave it to me,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” I said, and I waited a long time for her to elaborate. She began to leaf through the pages of the catalog, sighing and cooing at the pictures of dresses, and sometimes asking me to read for her what it said under the picture. After doing this for a while, I said, “They who?”
“Mr. Snow and them,” she said.
“The sheriff gave you ten dollars?” I asked. “What for?”
“To pay for my dresses and shoes, silly,” she said. “Don’t ye know, I’ve got to go to that there trial, come August? What does it say under this yere one?”
“‘Made of finest quality white lawn.’ How’s the knot on your head?”
She raised her hand and felt the top of her head. “It’s gone, I reckon. What’s ‘lawn’?”
“Sheer linen. Did you really git raped, Rindy?”
“Yep, I did. What does this one say?”
“‘A handsome white India lawn wrapper.’ You don’t want that one, it’d be too hot for August. Was it really Nail?”
“Then what about this one?”
“That’s taffeta silk and would make you look like a whore. Honest, did Nail really rape you?”
“Latha, ladybird lollypop, we swore we’d never ever tell a story to each other. Didn’t we? So don’t you git me to tell ye a story.”
In July most of Nail Chism’s sheep took sick and began to die. He was in that stone jail at Jasper, and although Waymon and Luther visited him and described to him the sheep’s symptoms, their diarrhea or scours, their choking and catarrh, their pining and staggers, Nail was helpless to do aught but instruct Waymon and Luther in comforts and solaces that didn’t even cure the sheep of whatever was ailing them, and it takes a shepherd to comfort and solace. But the best shepherd can’t produce rainfall, which is what we desperately needed. The sheep were thirsting to death, and so was the grass.
In August the men who sat on Willis Ingledew’s storeporch complained of the drought, and the heat, and they spent some time speculating about the upcoming trial, and they devoted only a small bit of discussion to what was happening far across the sea: some duke had been murdered in Austria, and the Russians and Germans were starting a fracas, and the English and French were getting into it too. The Jasper newspaper carried very little national news, let alone international news, and throughout that month of August, as the Germans invaded Belgium and the French invaded Lorraine, nobody in Stay More knew that the whole world was starting the Great War to End All Wars.
On a Monday in August the men on the Ingledew storeporch rode their horses or their mules, or drove their spring wagons if they had them, sometimes with families in them, to Jasper for the trial, to watch if not to participate. Jim Tom had explained to them it wouldn’t be any use for all of the storeporch crowd to keep saying the same thing over and over, that Nail was there at his usual time; three or four repetitions of that testimony were all that the court would tolerate.
I rode in with Jim Tom again, and this time my father and mother came along too, although it turned out they couldn’t get into the courthouse, it was so crowded. My father had been impressed that the county sheriff himself had paid us a visit the night before. Duster Snow had even had supper with us, unexpectedly, because he arrived at suppertime and Momma had to be polite. After my father and Duster had eaten (in those days the custom was always that the women and girls would wait until after the menfolk had finished before having their own supper), the sheriff said he wanted to talk to me while I ate; maybe he figured I couldn’t talk back to him with my mouth full.
Before I was separated from my parents at the courthouse, my father squeezed my arm very hard and s
aid, “Gal, don’t you go and bring no embarrassment upon us. You do what the sheriff tole ye to do, hear me?”
I knew I would be punished for it (and I was, later), but I disobeyed my father and the sheriff: I refused to tell the court that Nail Chism was the man I had seen looking at our playhouse. Judge Villines himself started in to asking me questions, helping out the prosecutor, but I swore the man I saw looking at our playhouse was not Nail Chism.
Fat lot of good it did. Dorinda Whitter sat there in her purewhite Sears, Roebuck lawn dress and told her story again as if she had been rehearsing it every spare minute of July, with somebody helping her rehearse; as if she had been practicing how to cry, and she did a real good job of crying. There was a lot of crying in the audience when she cried. And a lot of gasping. And more than one of the jurors had spittle dribbling down his chin. There were just twelve men this time, and none of them were sleeping or drunk, at least not while testimony was given and the summations were made, all in one afternoon. Juries in those days were never sequestered overnight, and a rumor went around that Sull J. held a quiet little party that night at his house, two blocks from the courthouse, with plenty of Chism’s Dew, ironically, I thought, and that certain of the jurymen had been present and had imbibed freely and had made up their minds then and there before they returned the next morning and required only forty-five minutes of deliberation to find Nail Chism guilty.
When Nail was asked by Judge Villines if he had anything to say before sentence was passed upon him, he said, “I jist want to ask one question: is there ary man, woman, or child in this here courtroom who honestly believes I raped that girl? If so, stand up and look me in the eye.”
For a full minute not one person stood, except Nail, who was already standing, towering over every man. Then, finally, the prosecutor and Sull Jerram nodded at each other and seemed to agree to rise up together, and those two stood. Then the foreman of the jury stood up. Three other jurymen rose, that’s all. After a few moments Judge Villines himself stood.
Maybe she was too dumb, but Dorinda herself never did think to stand up.
Judge Villines, still standing, along with those half-dozen others, said, “Nail Chism, it is the sentence of this yere court that you be committed to the custody of the Arkansas State Penitentiary in Little Rock and that there you be put to death according to law. May Gawd have mercy on yore soul.”
On the storeporch at Ingledew’s, in the days following, the men talked of the drought, and that ruckus in Europe, and not so much the guilt or innocence of Nail Chism as the exceptional speed of the trial (“Like them courthouse critters had made up their minds in advance,” one said) and the exceptional severity of the sentence. Nobody from Newton County had ever gone to the electric chair. It was an awesome fate, and not fully understood, since there was no electricity in Newton County—Jasper itself was still several years away from the first primitive attempts at electrification. The closest anybody could conceive of a lesson to explain it was getting lightningstruck, like old Haskins Duckworth, who couldn’t move one side of his face and was bald on that one side but was still alive, they thought. The only time anybody had been convicted of rape, not in my lifetime but back in the last century, they’d simply cut off his testicles and let him choose whether to sing soprano or stop going to church, and he chose the latter.
August is an awful month in the best of years, but that August the trees stopped singing, or they murmured dirges. Only the weeds and wildflowers throve: there was still yellow in the sneezeweed, coneflower, and goldenrod, the penstemons and great mulleins still held their heads high, and the wild bergamot and verbena must have found moisture in the air, but there was little green, just dusty shades of olive, drab shades of terreverte, faded shades of green ocher.
But the day they took Nail Chism off to Little Rock, it rained. Not a real toadstrangling pourdown but enough to settle the dust and sprinkle the dirt on the hogs’ backs. Not enough to save Nail’s sheep, who all died before he was scheduled to. In a bad drought, when people have a hard enough time feeding themselves, they tend to stop feeding their pets, and all the dogs of Stay More, hungry, began to run down the last of Nail’s lambs and to fight over the remains.
For the rest of the summer until school started I was confined to the house for disobedience (“grounded” in those days meant only what happened to you when you’d overdosed on Chism’s Dew). I didn’t see Dorinda again until school started, and we had a new teacher, Mr. Perry, who insisted we sit by grade, not by friendship, and I wouldn’t have sat with her by either.
Once at recess she tried to talk to me. “Latha, how come everbody acts like I done somethin wrong? How come it’s my fault I got raped?”
I just looked her in the eye for a while before I asked, “Did you get yourself raped?”
“Yes!” she yelled, and the other pupils stopped what they were playing to look at us. “Honest! I did! It hurt! It hurt me real bad!” She burst into tears. Whether or not she had faked her crying in the courtroom, she wasn’t pretending now.
“What’s the trouble here?” Mr. Perry said. He was new, and no one had ever told him.
“She hurts,” I said, and that’s all I said.
On
Lady, that’s enough now,” Warden Burdell said, and he held out his hand toward her as if asking her for the next dance. She stared at his hand, a chubby, gnarled, knobby, and hairy paw with dirt beneath each of the fingernails. It required a moment for her to realize that he was holding out his hand to be given the sheet of paper on which she was making her drawing, but she was in no hurry to hand it over to him. She had enjoyed these minutes of reprieve that her art had procured. Not that she had any wish to delay the execution of a convicted rapist, especially not one who had brutally abused and raped a child, but that this man’s last request, to see her drawing, had been an acknowledgment of the existence of her art. Nobody commented on her art—well, scarcely anybody other than her sister and Mr. Fletcher, the managing editor, who gave her these assignments and felt, doubtless, duty-bound to make some remarks about her work: “Good likeness,” “Clever lines,” “Fancy,” “Shows feeling,” or “It’ll do.”
She wanted to give her drawing of Nail Chism a final glance before handing it over to Warden Harris Burdell. Something wasn’t right. The ears perhaps; they really did stick out that much, but the shaved head seemed to exaggerate the protuberance of the ears into almost a caricature, and she did not want to seem to be making any sort of mockery. Actually, Nail Chism had been an exceptionally good-looking man when first she’d seen him, sitting beside her at the execution of the Negro Skipper Thomas. Chism had had his full head of hair then, although its yellow was already prematurely frosting white in places, and he’d worn some red bruises on his cheeks and temples as if he’d been in a fight…or been beaten.
Too, his heavy eyebrows, a darker blond than his hair had been, grew thicker as they met each other above the bridge of his nose, and this seemed to give him a coarse look, and to accentuate the effect of the shaved head. She had been especially careful with the skull, not to strain the shading of its bumps and general shape, because it was a fine cranium, almost Grecian. But what difference did such subtle shading make? The printed picture, on page 5 or 6 of tomorrow’s Gazette, wouldn’t retain the subtleties of her chiaroscuro.
She tore the sheet from its pad and handed it over to Warden Burdell. He took it and stared at it with a frown, as if seeing a Cezanne for the first time. Then he grinned his penitentiary smirk and said, “Hey, Chism, I caint show you this. It’ll give you the swell-head.” But he turned the drawing around and held it up by the corners so that Nail Chism could see it, held it as if Mr. Chism’s eyesight might be poor. “How ’bout that?” the warden asked. “Don’t that make you look like Miss Monday has done went and fell in love with you?” The doomed man squinted his eyes as if indeed his eyesight were bad, and focused on the drawing, and the trace of a smile gave sfumato to the edges of his mouth. He said nothing, howeve
r. “Are you satisfied?” the warden asked, expecting an answer, and waited.
“I reckon I look pretty awful,” the convict said. “I aint seen a mirror in a month. But leastways I don’t have to worry about my hair shootin out ever which way, like it always done.” He grinned.
“What do you say to the lady?” the warden prompted.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Nail Chism said, looking her right in the eye again, the way he had throughout his sitting, or standing, rather. It had disconcerted her, and perhaps even slowed down the progress of the drawing, the fixedness of his stare, his eyes trying to tell her his whole life’s story in these last minutes of it. “I’m much obliged to ye,” he said.
She spoke, for the first time, not knowing exactly what to say: “You’re welcome.”
That should have been the end of the exchange, but Nail Chism continued it: “You gave me a few more minutes of life, ma’am. I hope you’ll remember that. I hope it’ll be some comfort to ye.”
What could she say? He seemed to be expecting some response from her. The warden too was looking at her, waiting for her remark on that. She couldn’t think of anything to say. “I’m just doing my job,” she said modestly.
“HAW! I’M JUST DOIN MY JOB!” said Irvin Bobo, the executioner, and, in his bad idea of a joke, gave the switch a couple of practice jolts, which darkened the one green-shaded overhead light and made everyone except Bobo jump.
“Cut the shit, Bobo!” Warden Burdell said. Then he apologized to Viridis: “Pardon me, ma’am. He’s drunk, as usual. I reckon I’d git drunk too, I had to throw that switch on a feller. But Bobo’s impatient, and I don’t blame him, we’re all standin around talkin like it’s a goddamn tea party. Come on, boys, let’s get him to sit.”
For a second there Viridis thought he was referring to Irvin Bobo, as the one to sit. But then the two guards flanking Nail Chism, Gabriel “Fat Gabe” McChristian and James “Short Leg” Fancher, took the prisoner’s arms and led him to the electric chair and backed him up to it, and sat him down in it. From the moment he had first come into the room, the prisoner had amazed Viridis Monday by his composure and poise, and now in his last moments he was not struggling at all. Mr. McChristian took a small key from a chain on his belt and inserted it into the handcuffs that bound the prisoner’s wrists, and he unlocked and removed the handcuffs.
The Choiring Of The Trees Page 5
