Farrell Cobb stared at Nail’s plate, and his lips formed themselves into a suggestion of nausea. “In Mississippi,” he whispered, “they don’t get any meat whatsoever.” He looked around to see if any of the other men crowded along the benches were listening, but none of them were paying any attention to him, having already noted his suit and tie, his heavy overcoat which protected him against this biting cold, and having either recognized him or stopped wondering what he was doing here; or having never cared to begin with. “Just beans or cowpeas,” Cobb added, and added to that, “Well, I guess you’d not mind a serving of beans or some other vegetables too, but my experience is, the prisoners given a choice would always rather have a bit of fat meat than a bit of beans.” Nail ate. “Now, here we are discussing the menu when we ought to be considering more important matters, such as those contusions and risings you’ve recently acquired. Can you hear me?” Farrell Cobb kept his voice low and his mouth close to Nail’s ear. “If your beatings were provoked, all I can advise is to be very careful, to follow all the rules, to show proper respect for your keepers and superiors, to strive at all times to conform to the system, and to do nothing that might be construed as rebellious or aggravating. On the other hand, if you were beaten without provocation, that is indeed a sorry state of affairs, and one that I have protested time and time again, to little effect, I’m afraid, since, as you may have observed, it appears to be the routine in this institution, as everywhere else. I suppose we ought to condone a little corporal punishment in our efforts to wipe out capital punishment. But I know it hurts. I don’t approve of the strap, let me tell you.” Cobb’s gaze wandered up and down the table, seeking out the men who had obviously been victims of the strap and had recent cuts, welts, stripes, or scars to show for it. Nail kept chewing and let his eyes follow Cobb’s. He had not received any strap yet himself, only the backs and fronts of hands, and wooden clubs, which were bad enough. They had better not try to use any strap on him. “Well now, here we are talking about the mistreatment of prisoners as if anything could be done about it, when that is not really what I’m here to talk about at all. What I came to say was to give you a little report on our little efforts to get you out of that little old hot squat.” Cobb’s chuckle was audible to the other men, who raised their eyes from their plates to see what humor was the cause of it. Cobb noted his audience, and appeared on the verge of repeating his clever term for Old Sparky in order to amuse them. But he did not. Instead, he asked Nail, “Well, what do you say?”
“What do I say?” Nail asked.
“Yes: what do you have to say?”
“I’m fine, I reckon. How about you?”
“No, I mean, aren’t you going to say anything to me for what I did to get you a stay of execution?”
“Oh,” Nail said. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome. Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. I was on the telephone all of Tuesday night and most of yesterday. Thank God and Alexander Graham Bell. I’ll have you know I even placed through a telephone call to Fort Smith, to reach Judge Bourland, and that’s what? a hundred and fifty miles of telephone wire. If that wire hadn’t been there, you wouldn’t be here right now. It was Judge Bourland who got the Supreme Court to agree to hear your appeal, and it was his special-delivery letter hand-delivered to Governor Hays at 4:50 P.M. yesterday, just ten minutes short of the time the governor was to quit for the day, that persuaded him to use his authority to stop the execution.”
The gong clanged to signal the end of suppertime. The men stood as one, executed a right face—except Farrell Cobb, who turned the wrong way—and marched out in lockstep. Mr. Cobb got himself in line and attempted the lockstep in following after Nail, continuing to talk into his ear from behind but having to crane his neck to do so: “Judge Bourland said, and I quote him, that your defense was ‘butchered.’ Without naming names, he as much as called your James Thomas Duckworth a dolt and a bungling idiot who ought to be disbarred. I know that if we get the case to the full court when it meets again in January, we can convince them that Duckworth didn’t take the proper steps for appeal, not to mention that he made a perfect shambles of the trial itself.” At the door to the barracks, which Farrell Cobb could not enter, he quickly asked, “Is there anything I can do for you? Anything you need?”
“You said you’d get me home for Christmas,” Nail reminded him.
“Well, I am always an optimist,” Cobb said. “In this profession you must be constantly hopeful and confident. What say let’s shoot for Valentine’s Day, at the latest?”
Later Fat Gabe came to his bunk, with Short Leg and two of the Negro trusties, whose job, he discovered, was restraint more than anything else. “Uh-oh,” said Toy, and Stardust looked off into the next century, and Thirteen pretended he didn’t exist.
Fat Gabe said to Nail, “Who told you to talk to that man?”
“He did most of the talkin,” Nail replied.
“You think you’re some kind of privileged person? You think just because you beat the chair you can have special treatment? You think you can have company at supper?”
“I didn’t invite him,” Nail pointed out. “He’s a lawyer.”
“You talkin back to me?” Fat Gabe yelled.
“Nope, I’m jist tellin ye who’s who and who’s what.”
“That lawyer was Farrell Cobb, the biggest ass-licker in Pulaski County,” Fat Gabe said.
“You may be right,” Nail said.
“You sayin I’m not right?” Fat Gabe said.
“Naw, I said you may be right.”
“That’s what I thought you said, Chism. You think you’re somebody important, don’t you, just because you beat the chair? The chair couldn’t kill you, but I’ve got a notion to do it. Take down your pants.”
“Huh?” Nail said. “It’s too cold.”
“TAKE DOWN YOUR PANTS!” Fat Gabe yelled into his face. Nail did nothing. Fat Gabe looked at the two Negro trusties, each in turn. “What are you coons just standin there for? Take off his pants.”
While one of the Negroes and Short Leg held him, the other Negro pulled off his pants and then ripped off his underwear. “Turn ’im around,” Fat Gabe said, and they turned him to face the bunk and held his arms along the upper bunk. Nail could not see the instrument of punishment, but as soon as the first blow had fallen, he could picture it exactly: a strap of harness leather two and a half feet long by two and a half inches wide, attached to a wooden handle sixteen inches long, held in Fat Gabe’s hand, and swung back as far as he could reach. The other convicts made way to give Fat Gabe swinging room. Nail’s father Seth had tanned his hide, the last time, with a length of plow harness, when Nail was eleven years old and had refused to get up in the middle of the night to stoke the boiler in the still. Nail could still remember it, and he remembered counting the blows: ten in all, which had been enough to persuade him to obey his father the next time Seth asked him to do anything. I haven’t disobeyed anybody, Nail thought now, except I wouldn’t take down my pants like he asked me to, and I had a good reason for that: it’s freezing in here. But he felt already the heat of his smarting buttocks warming his whole body. He wasn’t cold anymore, just incredibly sore, and he counted the number of licks beyond ten: eleven and twelve and thirteen. You’d think Fat Gabe’s arm would tire out, but it didn’t. Something wet was trickling down the back of his legs, and he hoped it was shit but knew it was blood. Fourteen and fifteen and sixteen. As long as the blows had been falling on his skin it had been possible to bear them, but now each lash cut into wounded flesh and seared the raw underskin. Seventeen was an awful one unto itself. Eighteen was unbearable. Nineteen made him feel faint. Twenty…
He heard a voice say, “Turn him around,” and the two blacks who were keeping him from reaching his dagger and murdering Fat Gabe turned him toward his assailant, who was wearing a look as if he were not tired but enjoying himself, and who swung back the strap aiming to lash Nail on his genitals.
He b
egged for the first time in his life. “No!”
But Fat Gabe hit him there, and it was much worse than being hit on his buttocks. Even the torturer seemed to retain a shred of fellow-feeling to realize how hideous the scourging must have felt, and he was not putting the full force of his swing into the blows but checking them so that they slapped against Nail’s genitals without cutting, only stinging and bruising. Nail lost consciousness.
How much later he came to he couldn’t tell, except that it was dark and there was a face close to his own, speaking to him. The voice was Toy’s, and Toy had very bad teeth, which gave his breath a rancid stench, especially so close: they were lying side by side in the lower bunk. “They done that to me last week,” said Toy. “It helps if you kind of draw your knees up towards your chest. Here, you can have my space to draw up your knees. Like that. It keeps your balls from killing you. Don’t it? Do you feel some better that way?”
“Hush,” Nail said. “Let me sleep. Thanks.”
“You know what they strapped me for?” Toy went on. “At dinner once Stardust wouldn’t eat his bread, sometimes he don’t eat at all, and once when he left his bread like that I was real hungry so I took it and ate it. You know we aint supposed to touch nobody else’s food ’ceptin our own?”
“Yeah, that’s the rule,” Nail said. “Let’s be quiet now and go to sleep.”
“One of them nigger waiters saw me grab it, and he reported me, and I got twenty lashes behind and ten in front.” Toy sighed, and his sigh carried a full blast of fetor.
“Fat Gabe is the meanest feller on this earth,” Nail remarked. “Now hush. Shh. Let me sleep.”
“It wasn’t Fat Gabe that put the strap to me. It was the warden,” Toy said. “Mr. Burdell.” And Toy went on talking. He seemed on the verge of telling Nail his whole life’s story, and Nail began to crave some ventilation. Toy was born in Lonoke, Arkansas, and had been all the way to Memphis, a big town. He once went to a whorehouse in Memphis. He’d saved up his money from picking strawberries and wanted to find out what having two women simultaneously would be like. He picked out a light-haired one and a dark-haired one. Nail told himself that Toy must have had better teeth in those days, or no woman would have come near him. Toy began to tell what each of the women had done to him, or let him do to them.
“’scuse me,” Nail interrupted suddenly. “I need to go out real bad.” He climbed out of the bunk and painfully stood up, clutching his groin. He was not going out, of course, but he needed to find the pot, not just to get away from Toy; he was suddenly very sick in his bowels. If he didn’t get to the pot soon, he’d mess his pants. The barracks had a couple of those enameled tin slop buckets: a white enamel one for white men, a black enamel one for black men. In the dark it was hard to tell them apart, but Nail didn’t care. At least he had the decency to use the pot; most of the men thought that using the slop buckets was dandified, pretentious, effeminate: they preferred using the floor, and you had to be careful where you walked, especially if you were barefoot, as many of them were who couldn’t afford shoes. Nail never took off his brogans, but still he could feel an occasional squish beneath his feet as he stumbled through the rows of bunks, feeling his way with his hands, and touching an arm or a foot here and there, and unwittingly waking a man or two, who cursed. He reached one of the pots, black or white, just in the nick of time. The pot smelled far worse than Toy’s breath, and Nail poured into it a searing torrent of distress from his guts. He continued to squat there until long after the stabs and quakes had stopped tearing within him. He hoped that if he waited long enough, Toy would be asleep when he returned to the bunk.
But Toy suffered from insomnia and welcomed him back and resumed his long story of the Memphis brothel. Then he thought of an even better story: the time he found that nymphomaniac in the strawberry patch. He had to interrupt this story twice to allow Nail to stumble off into the darkness to the commode. Toy was still breathing his vile story when Nail managed at last to doze off.
The five o’clock gong woke him. Toy was still talking but had rolled onto his back and was telling his story to the ceiling, a tale of some De Valls Bluff girls who gang-raped a twelve-year-old Lonoke boy, not Toy but his cousin Virgil. At the fifth clang of the gong a guard yelled, “Rise and shine ’em, squad up and jump.” When Nail tried to get out of bed, he knew he was not going to be able to rise or to shine, to squad up or even to eat, let alone to jump. He was sicker than a dog, and it wasn’t any food he’d eaten that had done it either.
As Toy, Stardust, and Thirteen lined up and prepared to get into lock-step, Nail said to them, “Tell ’em I need a doctor.”
Much later in the morning two Negro trusties, not the same two who had held him when Fat Gabe laid the strap on him, came and got him and dragged him upstairs to the attic. It wasn’t a bare attic but had been fixed up into a kind of room. It had two windows, both of them rendered almost opaque by flyspecks. There were dirt-dobber nests on the rafters. The black men put him on one of the two cots and left him there. He was too sick to get up and reconnoiter the surroundings, but from where he lay he could see the blurred shapes of black bars through each flyspeck-frosted windowpane. The whole room smelled foul in a new kind of foulness that was almost a relief from the smell of Toy’s breath and the slop bucket because it was different: a smell of sickness and decay and, yes, something that Nail realized he’d never smelled before: death. The cot that Nail lay on had gray sheets that were ripped and stained but appeared to have been washed recently, while the other cot had sheets and blankets that were thick with dried blood and other discharges. The room was terribly cold yet not absolutely frigid; Nail realized that because it was in the building’s attic it received some warmth rising up from the barracks below, what little body heat the three hundred men had generated. The extreme cold of the room would not ordinarily have bothered him, but now in this sickness he was weak and began to shiver uncontrollably. Nail had enough strength to reach the other cot and remove its bloody blanket and wrap himself in it.
Eventually a man came in, accompanied by two more of the black trusties. He was dressed like them, dressed like Nail, in clothing printed with wide gray stripes. He wore thick spectacles and did not look like a criminal. He stared down at Nail not with curiosity or kindness but with a kind of boredom, and he asked, “What do you need?”
“I need a doctor, I reckon,” Nail said.
“You won’t get one,” the man said. “I used to be one. I’m the closest to one you’ll find. Gode’s my name. Now what do you need?”
“Something for my stomach,” Nail said. “Or my bowels. Or both.”
“Gaumed up or trots?”
“Trots.”
“Wee-wawed any?”
“Wee-wawed?”
Doc Gode did a pantomime of vomiting. “Puked.”
Nail shook his head and pointed at his mouth. “Not at this end.”
The man was staring at the top of his shaved head. “You been in the death hole? Your head’s peeled.”
Nail nodded. “I cheated the old hot squat,” he said, and smiled.
Doc Gode didn’t smile back. He reached inside his pocket and took out a key. On the wall of the flyspeck room was a wooden cabinet, its two doors latched and padlocked. The man unlocked and opened the cabinet. The two shelves inside contained a blue bottle, a brown bottle, and two bottles in shades of green, as well as a roll of gauze and a few other items. From where he lay Nail could only read the label on the brown bottle: carbolic acid. The ex-doctor took down one of the green bottles, uncorked it, and handed it to Nail. “Take just two swallows of this,” he commanded.
The label read: paregoric. The name sounded sinister. “What does it do?” Nail asked.
“It will ease your guts,” the man said. “Come on. Take two swigs and hand it back.”
The stuff didn’t taste too bad. After a second swallow Nail handed the green bottle back, and Doc Gode returned it to the cabinet. Before he could close the cabinet, Nail requ
ested, “Could you take a look at my behind? I reckon I may need a bandage back there.”
The man motioned for him to turn over, then pulled down the back of his pants, took a look, and said to the black trusties, “Hold ’im, boys.” The two Negroes grabbed Nail’s arms and gripped tightly, and soon Nail felt a burning on his butt worse than the licking he’d received, and he screamed.
When he got his voice back and could see through the tears in his eyes, he saw Doc Gode holding the unstoppered brown bottle, carbolic acid, and he said, “Ye gods! What was that for?”
“A little disinfectant,” Doc Gode said. “It’ll keep the germs out. But I can’t waste any wrappings on that. Just don’t sit on it for a week.”
There was a commotion on the stairs, the door flew open with a crash, and two more of the black trusties came into the room, carrying the limp form of a middle-aged white convict, naked, his entire body flayed: flaps of his flesh were dangling loose, two-inch strips of skin hung from wounds that looked as if they had been scorched with a hot iron, and he was covered with blood.
The blacks dumped the body onto the other cot. One of them said, “Marse Gabe done really laid it on ’im.” There was almost admiration in his voice, as well as awe. “Ole Marse Gabe done whupped de daylights out ob dis po buckra.”
Doc Gode lifted the man’s dangling arms and folded them over his chest. He opened one of the man’s eyelids and looked closely at the unseeing eye. He felt the man’s pulse. He turned his head and looked at Nail and asked disdainfully, “Now you see why I couldn’t waste any bandages on you?” Doc Gode took down the roll of gauze from the cabinet and the bottle of carbolic acid. He gave Nail one more look. “You don’t want to watch this.”
The Choiring Of The Trees Page 12
