The Choiring Of The Trees

by Donald Harington

  “I like it here,” Nail observed. “Why’ve I gotta move to the stockade?”

  Fat Gabe hit him with the back of his hand swung hard across his face. “That’s twice this evenin you’ve ast me a question, Chism.”

  Short Leg, who wasn’t as bad as Fat Gabe, had the kindness to explain: “You aint condemned anymore, at least not for right now. You caint stay in the death hole till you get another date set up with Old Sparky.”

  Nail wiped the blood from his mouth and turned to call goodbye and good luck to Ramsey, the quiet murderer who’d been moved into Skip’s cell when Skip was killed. Ramsey did not answer. Then the two guards marched Nail up out of the electric light and power building, across the yard, and into the main building, to the stockade, which was just one huge room, a barracks with few windows covered with wire mesh as well as thick bars, in which three hundred men were crowded together. The beds were double-tiered, and, as Nail discovered, four men slept together in each bed. He had slept in the same bed with his brothers Waymon and Luther; he knew how to sleep with other men, but those had been his own kinfolks, not strangers. The blacks and the whites were separated: the three men he would have to sleep with were all, more or less, the same color as he. Those three were sitting on the edge of their double-bunk or standing around it, waiting to see who the new man would be, and they sized him up; he was taller than any of them.

  “Don’t I get any supper before bedtime?” Nail asked his guards before they abandoned him there.

  Fat Gabe stood on tiptoe to hit him again, in the face, then slugged him in the stomach to bend him down to his own level, and backhanded him once more across the face, to knock him down. “That’s three questions you’ve ast me, Chism. When will you know better?”

  Short Leg removed his handcuffs. Nail wanted to take out his dagger and slash up both of them, especially Fat Gabe, but it wasn’t the right moment yet. He had suffered worse beatings than this. He remained sitting on the floor, holding his arms around his knees.

  “New boy, what’s your name?” asked one of the three men at his double-bunk. He was a young man nearly as corpulent as Fat Gabe but not as muscular. Nail Chism told them his name. He learned theirs, or, rather, their nicknames, for each man in the prison was known only by his nickname, and his sentence, or “time.” The fat one was called Toy, doing two years for stealing a bicycle. There was a thin one called Stardust, who did not look at Nail when he was introduced, who did not look at anything, who seemed to be staring at something impossibly far away. He had written bad checks and was doing three. The third one, doing five for safecracking, was a glowering, ugly, scarfaced man not as tall as Nail but more powerfully built, called, for a reason Nail never learned, Thirteen.

  Nail’s bunkmates understood his name to be Nails, and thence-forward everyone called him that; it stood him in good stead, because it suggested being tough as nails, mean as nails, hungry enough to eat nails. He got a chance to earn his nickname that first night: Thirteen tried to persuade Nail to let him put his penis in Nail’s mouth; Nail declined rudely, and later, when they’d gone to bed and Thirteen was sleeping behind Nail, Thirteen tried to force himself into Nail’s anus; Nail whipped around and hit him, and Thirteen fought back viciously. The two men slugged and whomped and whacked each other all over the barracks before the night guards came in with wooden clubs and knocked them both senseless.

  When Nail regained consciousness in the short hours of the morning, he found he was on the cement floor between bunks. The floor smelled of piss, tobacco spit, and shit, and it was harder than nails, but at least he had it to himself. He rolled over and cradled his head on his arm and settled himself for sleep, but he became aware of the sounds: a general steady, grinding hum of many noses snoring in unison and counterpoint, punctuated by voices mumbling in nightmares or severe dreams; occasional grunts, snorts, creaking of bedframes; and, reminding him of bullfrogs croaking on the creek-bank, a chorus of farts. He listened to this mixture of sounds for a long time until it became almost monotonous, no longer novel and interesting. He rolled over to cradle his head on the other arm. He found himself thinking, for a while, of Miss Monday. What had she said her first name was? Something he’d never heard before. Maris or Berdice or Vernice. She was a real looker, good for the eyes, classy and sniptious, spiffy and neat. In fact she was the spiffiest creature ever he’d seen. She was friendly too. And nice! Why, there’d been few women he’d ever known, his sister Irene for one, who were as nice. Had Berdice Monday really meant that about the trees? Or had she just been saying that to humor him? What call did she have to make him feel good? Anyway, he did feel real good, thinking of her, and it helped him fall asleep at last.

  Hers was the first face he saw in deep sleep, that lovely smile, only this time it wasn’t smiling but looking sad because he was sitting in Old Sparky waiting for Bobo to pull the switch. Only it wasn’t really him, it couldn’t be him, because there he sat beside Vernice Monday, that was sure enough him. Then who was this him sitting here in this electric chair? He looked at his strapped arms and saw they were black. He realized that this evening wasn’t the evening of the day before, December 2nd, his day, but the evening of October 31st, time had gone all the way back to Halloween, more than a month before, and he was a black boy named Skipper Thomas, who had been accused of killing his white lady that he worked for, although nobody’d ever seen him do it or had any evidence whatever and he’d worked for her long enough to know that it was her own nephew who’d done it so he’d get the money she left, but it was too late now, there was Mr. Burdell the warden with his hand in the air, and now he drops his hand, and I feels it! I feels the current coming up my legs and down from my head and meeting in my innards and there’s Mr. Bobo with his dull dumb blank look like he’s just absentmindedly broken off a limb from a bush, only it’s not a limb it’s the switch-handle, the switch-handle is down, the current is surging, my body is rumbling like a freight train, my head is shaking awful, I am biting my tongue nearly in two and trying to say to the trees, Save me, trees! Oh trees, save me! I’m not ready to die-ie-ie-ie! and I am trying hard to keep my heart still beating, my heart is pounding to keep from ever stopping, my heart will go on and on, although my head begins to hurt like no headache I’ve ever known, my legs are shot through with the pain of a thousand needles, my skin is all on fire, my stomach is boiling and about to come up through my gullet and into my mouth, I am in awful pain! and Mr. Bobo unbreaks the broken twig, he raises the switch-handle back up to where it was, and I know that I have lived! The current has not killed me, my heart beats strong, I am still alive, but the pain! The good God never intended for any of His mortal creatures to feel a pain as terrible as this, to burn like this. I look at Miss Maris Monday and her face is all stricken in what she knows must be my pain, and I look at Mr. Nail Chism sitting there beside her and he too has clenched his jaw and his eyes are stricken not because he knows this is what he too is going to have to endure come December but because he knows that no human being not even a worthless black nigger like me who shouldn’t have been born in the first place ought to bear such hideous agony as this death that burns and tears and strips all of my flesh and soul except my heart which still beats strong and wants to live! and Mr. Nail Chism’s eyes get wet and he yells, “Goddamn you, Bobo, turn up the juice and leave it on!” and sweet-faced lady Miss Berdis Monday puts her hand on his arm to calm him down. Mr. Bobo looks at Mr. Burdell the warden and Mr. Burdell nods his head once and Mr. Bobo pushes the switch-handle back down and once more I feels it! Once more I feels the divine almighty current charge like a thousand horses running through my veins and the violent fire burns away my pain for one long forever although my teeth are one by one jarred loose in my mouth and my eyeballs get rolled back inside my head so that I am blind and can no longer see the sweet but stunned face of Miss Vernice Monday and the sympathetic scowl of Mr. Nail Chism and I can’t see nothing only the raging of the horses that trample upon my heart but still can’t make it st
op. The horses give up. The current stops. My eyes are blind, my nose is stopped by the stink of my burning skin, only my ears can hear the voice, it’s no angel coming for to carry me home but that warden Mr. Burdell: “Is he dead?” No, I am not dead, but I have now abandoned God before He ever had a chance to abandon me: I have done went and quit Him for eternity because no God however powerful or wrathful could create the kind of pain that wracks me now: this kind of pain could only be the work of Satan; only the Devil Himself could be evil enough to create such unspeakable torture and punishment as this burning pain.

  I spit out my fallen teeth to free my tongue, and I cry, “Mo juice! In de name ob de Debbil, mo juice!”

  A hand was shaking Nail’s shoulder, and he raised his head from the concrete floor. The first light of dawn was coming into the barracks, and the face peering into his own was that of the mute Stardust, who was not now mute: “Is it orange juice you’re asking for? We don’t have any.”

  Nail sat up and gave his head a toss to clear it. “What?” he said.

  “You were screaming for juice,” Stardust said. “We haven’t even water to drink. If you are very thirsty, I will pee for you.”

  “Leave me alone,” Nail said, and turned away and tried to sleep again.

  The only advantage to being in the stockade instead of the death hole, he discovered later that day, was that in the stockade you were sometimes allowed to go to the visit room, a wooden shack built up against the high brick wall of The Walls, which had one door leading through the wall to an anteroom, beyond which was the outside world. The visit room was divided down the middle by a screen of heavy wire that nothing larger than a nail could pass through. A trusty-guard with a shotgun and a pair of bolstered six-shooters guarded the room. Once a month you were allowed one visit to the visit room, for not more than fifteen minutes…if you had anyone who wanted to come and talk to you. Many of the men never had any visitors. If you were in the death hole, you were not allowed to go to the visit room; the only visitor who could come to the death hole was Jimmie Mac the preacher, or your lawyer, if you had a good one, or, the day before your death, your mother or wife or sweetheart. Nail’s mother had not been able to make the long trip from Stay More.

  But Nail had a visitor his first day out of the death hole. Short Leg came and got him and escorted him to the visit room. It had been so long since he’d last seen his older brother that he hardly knew him.

  “Waymon!” Nail said, and he wanted to ram his manacled hands through the wire screen so he could shake hands with old Waymon. “What’re you doin here?”

  Waymon grinned. “Came to take yore body home,” he said. “You know them two ole mules, Spiff and Greeny, that you used to hire out from Ingledew’s to take yore wool to Harrison? Wal, I’ve got ’em right out’s yonder, hitched to a wagon with a coffin in it, purtiest piece of carpentry ye ever seen. Took me ten days to git to Little Rock, cold as it’s been.”

  Nail couldn’t help laughing, and when he laughed, so did Waymon. The guard looked at them as if they’d gone crazy. “I shore hate to disappoint you,” Nail said, “and make you go home empty-handed.”

  “What have they done to ye?” Waymon asked. “Brother, you look lak somethin the cat drug in. Got a knot on yore bald haid the size of a baseball. And all them bruises! What did they beat ye up fer?”

  “Askin too many questions,” Nail said. “Leastways, I’m alive.”

  “Shit, I never liked to stand around through a funeral, nohow,” Waymon said. “And it would’ve cost us forty dollars for yore headstone. Paw spent the last cent we had for that new lawyer, Cobb.”

  Nail did not find that funny. “That right? He oughtn’t’ve done that.”

  “And mortgaged the farm besides.”

  “Mortgaged?” Nail was indignant. “Who put the mortgage on us?”

  “John Ingledew,” Waymon said. “The Jasper bank wouldn’t even talk about it. But Ingledew’s bank needed the business, I reckon, and he give Paw three hunderd dollars for the whole place, includin Maw’s old eighty.”

  Nail’s hands spread against the chain of the handcuffs as if he were trying to break it. “I’ll kill that son of a bitch.”

  “Naw, Nail,” Waymon said. “Ingledew’s doin us a favor. All them Jasper folks is on the side of Sull and Duster Snow and them. Wasn’t for John Ingledew, we couldn’t never’ve got ye that new lawyer.”

  “How is Paw?” Nail wanted to know.

  “Porely,” Waymon said. “But not on account of this business. You know he’s had that heart dropsy for some years. Doc Plowright says he ort to go up to the hospital up to Harrison.”

  “Why don’t he?” Nail asked, and when Waymon did not answer but just hung his head, Nail asked, “Don’t he have none of that three hunderd dollars left?”

  Waymon tried to explain. It was complicated. That new lawyer they’d hired, Farrell Cobb of Little Rock, wasn’t charging them the whole three hundred dollars for his appeal to the Supreme Court. Part of it was a “retainer,” which, Waymon attempted to explain, was to make sure that Mr. Cobb would do everything he could, for as long as it took, to get Nail out. The agreement with Cobb stipulated that in the event of Nail’s electrocution, Seth Chism would get a partial refund.

  “Shit,” Nail commented. “Paw’d be better off if I was fried, after all.”

  “Don’t ye talk lak thet, Nail,” Waymon pled. “Yore life is worth a whole lot more than three hunderd dollars.”

  “It aint worth more than our whole damn farm!” Nail said. Then he asked, “How’s my sheep?”

  Again Waymon hung his head. “Nail, I hate to tell ye. You know I hate to tell ye. What few of them sheep the drought didn’t git, the dogs got.”

  “Ever last one of ’em?” Nail asked. “Didn’t they leave me a lamb or two?”

  Waymon shook his head.

  “Well,” Nail said, and pictured his pastures empty of their flocks. Right now there would be no grass: the last of the autumn grass would be gone, and the spring grass not started yet. He asked, “How’s Maw?”

  “Jist fine,” Waymon said. “She wanted to come with me, but Paw wouldn’t let her. She’ll shore be glad to see that I’m bringin a empty box home.”

  “Irene? How’s she been?” Nail asked of their sister.

  Waymon gave his head a tilt and dip. “Lonesome, don’t ye know? But she’s a big help to Maw, and they keep each other company, I reckon.”

  “She don’t see Sull no more?”

  Waymon shook his head. “She aint been back to Jasper one time since yore trial.”

  They talked until their fifteen minutes were up. Waymon told him that he had accosted Sull Jerram on the square in Jasper and told him that he, Waymon, intended to put him in his grave if Nail died in the chair. Waymon’s parting words to his brother were “Well, you didn’t die in the chair, but I’m a mind to put Sull in his grave anyhow, for what he done to ye.”

  Waymon was not the only visitor he had that day. Two more visitors came before dark. You were supposed to get only one visit a month, but these two didn’t count, because they were the preacher and the lawyer. The preacher was Jimmie Mac, who said he just wanted to say he was real happy that Nail was still alive and he wondered if Nail had had time yet to make up his mind that the good Lord Himself had seen fit to spare him, and wasn’t that enough to convince him that the good Lord really did exist and cared for him? Jimmie Mac was disappointed to learn that Nail had not followed his advice and spent his last hours in prayer, but he could understand how a feller might have other things on his mind at such a time. But now that the execution had been postponed, didn’t Nail think he had some time to seek out the Lord and take it to Him in prayer and ask Him for His forgiveness and blessing and promise of salvation forevermore? Didn’t Nail know that God loved him? Didn’t Nail realize that God works in mysterious ways and we are not to question His wisdom but glory in His deeds? Had Nail read Hebrews the twelfth chapter and the verses three through thirteenth, especially
the sixth verse: “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth”? Didn’t Nail wish to be a son of the Lord and endure the Father’s chastisement? Couldn’t Nail understand what a challenge it was to be chastened and punished and to survive whole and pure in the sight of God and reap the rewards of life everlasting and the fruits of righteousness?

  “No,” replied Nail.

  “No which?” asked Jimmie Mac.

  “No I don’t have much use for that Lord,” he said.

  The lawyer came just before suppertime and wasn’t required to use the visit room but was allowed to sit with Nail right in the mess hall. The lawyer was right at home here in The Walls and had been here many times before. “The missus is expecting me shortly or I’d break bread with you,” he apologized, wedging himself in between Nail and the fat convict named Toy on the long bench. There were only two tables in the mess hall, but each of them was the length of the room; all of the white men sat at one table, all of the black men at the other. “No reflection on the quality of the food, you understand,” Farrell Cobb remarked, lowering his voice conspiratorially. The food was the same Nail had for lunch and for breakfast, the same food they’d served him when he was in the death hole, the same food everybody got three times a day, seven days a week: one piece of cold cornbread, one small chunk of mostly fat probably from beef but hard to tell, one cup of something warm that Nail had never been able to determine was supposed to be taken for coffee or soup but that could be either, or neither. The butcher shops of Little Rock were swept of their scraps at the end of the business day, and the fatty scraps were served at the Arkansas State Penitentiary.