The Choiring Of The Trees

by Donald Harington

  It was enough to drive a fellow crazy, if he wasn’t already. Nail had two things that kept him from going over the brink: his tree charm, which he would finger in moments of intense anxiety, and the one December letter from Viridis, by now reduced almost to shreds; but no matter if it did eventually disintegrate, he knew it by heart. He almost knew by heart what the next letter would say, if it ever came—or at least what he would want it to say, and exactly how he would want her to say it: that she was setting him free.

  In his restlessness he began to get the first exercise he’d had since they threw him in The Walls. He began to pace. Sometimes he couldn’t just lie on his bed or sit on the edge of it talking to Timbo Red and watching him fill up his sketchbook. Often it was hard to watch Timbo Red’s sketches, because the boy began to draw increasingly from his memory of the scenes of his youth that were pleasant: the creeks and forests and pastures of Stone County—woodland scenes and meadow scenes and deer at gloaming, tranquil pools and soaring crags and sunsets on the ridges. The kid sure could draw. You could almost be there, the scenes were so real, but they only made Nail’s eagerness to get home even worse, and after watching Timbo Red draw for a little while, he had to get up and start walking. He walked up and down the rows of the bunks, the whole length of the barracks, several times and back. In the beginning of his hikes he made the mistake of wandering into the rows of the bunks where the blacks lived, and they stopped what they were doing or saying and watched him pass, and one of them reached out and stopped him and said, “Wat baw, you know way you is at?” and he confessed, “I reckon I don’t,” and got himself out of that neighborhood and back among the whites, who paid him no more notice than to the several other compulsive ambulators.

  All of this walking increased his appetite, and he began to do what Viridis had advised him: eat whatever they gave him. He ate whatever was on his plate and watched for chances to filch crumbs of cornbread from anybody else’s plate. He even regained a couple of pounds, at the risk of getting caught violating a main rule: don’t ever eat anybody else’s food. He began to sit next to men whose appetites he knew were poor: the old, the sick, the apathetic. He became adept at sliding his hand beneath the edge of the table and up over the edge to snatch any morsel remaining.

  He walked and he ate and he regained some of his health. Then Fat Gabe caught him stealing food. Not Fat Gabe himself but one of the black trusties whose job it was to stool to him. But instead of giving Nail a dose of the strap, Fat Gabe did a strange thing: at the next breakfast he brought him an egg, the first egg Nail had seen since he’d been in The Walls, the first protein since Christmas. It was hard-boiled, not pan-fried the way his mother used to fix him a half dozen of each morning, but it was a genuine egg. He knew better than to ask any questions of Fat Gabe, so he didn’t ask him what it was for, or what he had done to deserve it. He just ate it. At dinner Fat Gabe brought him an extra plate of cornbread and beef fat. He ate it. And at supper Fat Gabe did the same, or, rather, he began to have the trusty who waited on the table make sure that Nail got a second helping. This continued daily.

  Nail wondered if Fat Gabe was getting soft. Or religious. Or just tired of being mean and evil. But no, if anything, Fat Gabe was growing even more vicious in his treatment of other men: he now had twenty-one notches on his belt, and he seemed to be getting so much exercise and muscular development from his daily floggings that he could administer up to forty lashes before beginning to tire. The two trusties who were required to sit on the victim’s head and feet and hold him down often were exhausted from their efforts before Fat Gabe began to tire. And Fat Gabe was always seeking to refine the severity of his methods: he now had a long leather strap that had brass brads embedded in the tip to impart an extra fillip of pain and laceration. Then Fat Gabe discovered that boring a number of penny-sized round holes in the strap would not only reduce air resistance and make the strap faster and harder but also leave blisters and welts. No, Fat Gabe was becoming anything but soft. As an ultimate infliction of pain, certain to fill the barracks with endless screams, he sponged salt water into the wounds. Eventually Doc Gode was required by Fat Gabe to sit and take the victim’s pulse and keep the torturer informed of the floggee’s heart rate, in order to determine the maximum number of lashes—thirty-five or forty—that could be tolerated in one day. After forty lashes drenched with salt water, most men faced the prospect of three weeks upstairs in the flyspeck room recuperating or dying under Doc Gode’s supervision. Every week Fat Gabe put another notch on his belt.

  Nail considered the possibility that Fat Gabe was giving him extra food only because he had received orders from above—perhaps the governor himself had been influenced by Viridis (and Rindy too). But Nail usually ate his extra ration without reflecting on it: you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

  Most of the other men did not resent Nail for his extra food. As one of them put it, “A double helping of shit is still shit.” But a few, especially those who had been sent out of The Walls all day to do hard work at the lumberyard or the brick kiln or on the railroad and had ravenous appetites when they returned, begrudged Nail his double servings of food because he was never even sent out of The Walls to work. One of these observed, at the table in the hearing of anybody watching Nail start on his second plate, including Fat Gabe’s stoolie, “Nails is just gettin fattened up for the slaughter.” And the men nodded their heads and chuckled or grinned.

  Timbo Red too began to suspect that Fat Gabe was giving Nail extra food only because “he’s tryin to git ye back in shape so’s he kin destroy ye.” Nail considered this and remembered the threat that Fat Gabe had made to him before Christmas: “I’m gonna save ya till you’re strong enough to ’preciate what I’m gonna do to you.” It had been noticed that Fat Gabe never administered the strap or any of his other tortures to ailing men, weak men, men too frail to fight back. He seemed to have a fondness for flogging men who were much stronger than he himself could ever aspire to be. Nail noticed that the most recent deaths from the brass-bradded lash and brine-soaked sponge had been men who were notably muscular, hale, and, at least until their punishment, indomitable. Nail decided he had better not give the appearance of becoming too healthy.

  More men tried to escape. The coming of springtime always makes prisoners want to get out, to go home and do their plowing and planting, or at least to get out where they can watch the world wake up to the new season. The rising of the sap probably accounted as well for Fat Gabe’s increased energy, and the severity of his scourge was another motive for attempts at escape. In the few years since the old state penitentiary had been torn down to give its hill to the new state capitol, and the high, thick barrier of brick on a hill outside of town had been stacked into the rectangle called The Walls, there had been only two or three successful escapes, and of those, only one was still at large, a murderer named McCabe, whose method of escape was kept a secret from both the public and the prison population. Every man inside wanted to become the second at-large escapee. They schemed and plotted, and conjectured about McCabe’s possible modus operandi, and they tried to acquire lengths of rope, or to fashion rope out of stripped bedclothes, or to make primitive ladders. The few who managed to scale the wall without getting shot by the trusties manning the four towers at the corners of the The Walls made it as far as the swampy thickets to the south, where, within a few hours at most, bloodhounds tracked and caught them. A shed right behind Warden Burdell’s house had six bloodhounds penned up and ready to go. According to rumor, the one man who had eluded the bloodhounds had disguised his scent by smearing mustard oil on his feet. But none of the rumors told how he had acquired the mustard oil in the first place.

  Strong men who attempted escape that month of March were the especial targets of Fat Gabe’s flagellations. He did not need to fabricate an excuse to whip them; attempted escape was a felony, and, to discourage others from making the attempt, the flogging was made as visible and audible as possible: everybody had to gather
in a thick circle around the inverted wheelbarrow over which the body of the man would be held by three trusties while Doc Gode took the man’s pulse and a fifth trusty sponged salt water into the wounds that Fat Gabe steadily inflicted, to a total of one hundred and sixty, if the victim could bear the maximum of forty per day and live through four days of it. No inmate forced to stand and watch that performance through four days would give a lot of thought to attempting escape himself, but it was still an option preferable to death in the flyspeck room.

  Fat Gabe not only kept feeding Nail all he could eat, he also began to let him outside the building. The warm weather made it necessary to open the windows and get as much air as possible into the barracks, and to get as many men as possible out into the Yard. The Yard was only a yard: merely all of the empty space between the brick buildings and the brick walls, a few acres of what had once been grass but was now mostly mud and sand, with just a smear of green here and there. Fifty men at a time, guarded by a shotgun trusty, would be allowed to go out into the Yard for an hour and walk, jump, run, waddle, or crawl—anything except stand and congregate and talk. Nail took advantage of being let out into the Yard to study the walls very carefully, to memorize the length and height and even the brick patterns of every section. He observed that the brick building of the engine room, which also contained Old Sparky and the death cells, was much closer to the wall than the main barracks. He noticed that at one place along the wall a corner of the engine building’s roof obscured the view from the tower. Why, he asked himself, was he making all these observations if Viridis and Rindy were going to make the governor let him go? The answer, he told himself, was that week by week his chance of a pardon appeared slimmer and slimmer.

  The month of March was marching on and he hadn’t had his March trip to the visit room. Surely Viridis had at least tried to visit him. Once when Fat Gabe and Short Leg were making their rounds, Nail forgot that he was never supposed to question them. “Short Leg,” he asked, “you don’t reckon anybody came to see me at the visit room that you didn’t tell me about, did they?”

  Short Leg exchanged glances with Fat Gabe, the two of them astounded that an experienced convict would violate the cardinal rule against asking them questions. Short Leg didn’t know whether to hit Nail or not, but when he raised his hand, Fat Gabe said, “He aint ready yet,” and then he even smiled almost friendly-like at Nail and said, “We’ll let that one go, Chism. Just watch it.”

  After the two sergeant-guards had moved on, Timbo Red exclaimed to Nail, “I tole ye, didn’t I? They’re jist a-waitin till ye git to lookin real peart afore they light into ye.”

  But just a day later, as if Nail’s question had produced some result, he was summoned by Short Leg for a trip to the visit room.

  It wasn’t Viridis. It was Farrell Cobb. Nail complained, “I thought you generally came into the barracks to see me. Now you’re using up my visit room time.”

  Cobb whispered, “They’re shaking down everyone they admit to the compound.” He patted his breast. “I didn’t want them to find what I’m carrying.”

  “A gun?” Nail said.

  Cobb laughed. Nail had never heard him laugh, nor suspected that he was capable of it. “No. A very thick letter. Pages and pages.”

  Nail felt stifling frustration. He swore. He glanced all over the edges of the screen separating him from Cobb, as if there might be some opening the letter could be slipped through. He studied the trusty, Bird, who was just standing there looking bored and blank. He inclined his head toward Bird and whispered to Cobb, “I don’t suppose you could bribe him to let me have it.”

  Cobb shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to try.”

  “Well, shit,” Nail muttered. Then he asked, “Did you read it? I reckon you could just tell me most of it.”

  Cobb cleared his throat. Of course he didn’t want to admit that he had read the letter. “I skimmed most of it,” he said. “There isn’t much news that I couldn’t tell you myself. There’s a very long account of her trip to your hometown and her meetings with the various figures involved in the case, such as Judge Sewell Jerram and the sheriff, et cetera. There’s a long account of her attempts to see the governor. An unfortunate business. A truly lamentable state of affairs. She and the child, Dorinda Whitter, tried for a week to get an audience with Governor Hays. They sat in his waiting-room for three whole days. Yes, three days, and I was there with them part of the third day, when I finally demanded of the governor’s assistant that we get admitted to his private office. Most regrettably, Viridis Monday was very angry by that time and her mood kept her from presenting her case effectively to the governor, toward whom she was openly hostile. In this letter…” (again Cobb patted his breast, where Nail could see a bulge beneath his suit coat) “…she gives reasons for her anger at the governor which are unjustified, I think. She even went so far as to tell the governor that he was responsible for Dorinda Whitter, that he would have to make the child his own ward, a preposterous suggestion, if I may say so, and I did say so.”

  “Go on,” Nail said. “So you’re tellin me the governor didn’t buy none of it? No pardon, huh?”

  “Not necessarily on account of Miss Monday’s rudeness. The governor feels strongly that the whole business would have to go through strictly legal channels, the case would have to be referred back to a lower court, you would need to be retried if that could even be considered acceptable by the court, you would have to follow established procedures, you couldn’t just impose upon the governor’s charity.”

  “Didn’t that governor believe what Rindy told him?”

  “I’m afraid the child didn’t get a chance to tell him her story. The governor insisted that she would have to tell it to a court, not to him.”

  “But didn’t he even take a gander at that petition with all those names that Viridis had got signed for him?”

  “He said he was most curious to know if the petition contained the names of Prosecuting Attorney Thurl B. Bean and Circuit Judge Lincoln Villines. It does not, of course. The governor is of the opinion that Judge Villines must recommend leniency to him, or at least recommend a retrial, and Judge Villines will not. I might add that Judge Villines is, it would appear, an old friend of the governor’s.”

  “It would appear,” Nail echoed. He asked, rhetorically and futilely, “What kind of governor is that man anyhow?”

  “For now, the only one we have, alas,” Farrell Cobb said, the closest he ever came to expressing any sentiment against the governor.

  “So what’s the next step?” Nail asked.

  “Next step?”

  “Yeah, how long does it take to get another trial, or whatever?”

  Farrell Cobb shook his head. “You don’t understand,” he said. “The governor was our last resort.”

  “But didn’t ye jist say something about the governor hisself says that the case has to go back to a lower court and git retried?”

  “Only if Judge Villines recommends it, and he does not.”

  “Well, fuck Link Villines! If a judge does something wrong, he aint likely to ask somebody else to come along and tell him how bad he done. Of course he don’t want a retrial!”

  “That’s the way the law works,” Farrell Cobb said.

  Nail stared at him in disbelief. “If that’s the way the law works, you ought to be ashamed to call yourself a lawyer.”

  Farrell Cobb reddened. Testily he said, “Insults won’t work with me.”

  “Then what in hell will work with you? Tell me that! What have I got to do or say to get some help from you?”

  “Mr. Chism, I’ve given you quite a lot of help,” the lawyer said coldly. “I’ve gone to some extraordinary lengths to appeal your case. In fact, I think it’s safe to say I’ve worked harder on this case than any in my career.”

  “But I’m still going to the chair,” Nail said.

  Farrell Cobb did not deny it. But he didn’t exactly concede it. After a while he just gave his head a slow shake and sai
d, “Quite conceivably.”

  Nail gestured toward Cobb’s breast, where the precious thick letter was. “Did she give me any hope?” he asked.

  Cobb reached for the envelope as if to verify an answer but thought better of it and stuck his hand into his outside coat pocket instead. “As I seem to recall her saying, she said you should not give up. She said something about attempting to attract national publicity to your case.”

  “What does that mean?” Nail wanted to know.

  “The big newspapers and magazines in the East might take an interest in you, and if there were sufficient national publicity, it could pressure the governor into reconsidering.”

  Nail thought about that. Bird announced that the fifteen minutes were up. Nail said, “Jist one more question. The national publicity would have to come before April 20th, right?”

  “One would hope,” Farrell Cobb said.

  April came. Nail worked on his letter to Viridis. He wrote it and rewrote it, trying to get each sentence perfect in his mind before committing it to paper. Paper was scarce; he had only a few sheets left from the penny pad Warden Burdell had given him at Christmas. As a last favor Farrell Cobb had agreed to come back to the penitentiary when he could safely come into the barracks and take the letter out. Nail hoped that Viridis might come to the visit room even before then, but, as he told her in the letter, he didn’t blame her for not coming: it was too painful, for both of them, to realize they couldn’t say anything in just fifteen minutes. He told Viridis he wanted to remember her as he had last seen her: happy, beaming, exhilarated from her trip to Stay More, optimistic, bearing the secret of having brought his accuser to apologize. He said how profoundly grateful he was to Viridis for whatever she had done to persuade Dorinda not only to admit her wrongdoing but to come to him and tell him to his face. Even if he was executed, he would know that there was no greater proof of his innocence than a confession from Rindy herself. He said he was sorry that the governor had not heard Rindy say it. He said the only times lately when he got really angry, mad enough to fight Fat Gabe himself, was when he thought about the injustice of that governor making Viridis sit in the waiting-room for three days before letting her talk to him. He didn’t blame her for getting rude to the governor. If it had been him, he would have been more than rude: he would have clobbered that governor. He confessed he spent a lot of time thinking about killing the governor.