The Arkansas Democrat, an evening paper, scooped the Gazette with the front-page story under the headline GOVERNOR ‘FURIOUS’ AT PRESS OVER CHISM INCIDENT; FIRES WARDEN and the subhead CALLS OUTSIDE JOURNALISTS ‘MEDDLERS’; THREATENS TO ‘THROW THE SWITCH MYSELF.’ The Democrat gave a full report of the scene at the aborted execution, including the condemned man’s moving appeal, not for himself but for his fellow convict, “less than of age” Ernest Bodenhammer, and his accusation that Bodenhammer’s victim, the guard McChristian, had murdered numerous inmates. The reporter, to Viridis’ embarrassment, quoted the condemned man’s intended-to-be-last words, “Tell her that I and the trees will love her forevermore,” and identified “her” as “Little Rock reporter-illustrator Viridis Monday, 26, daughter of banker Cyril J. Monday,” but was not able to identify the reference to trees.
Tom Fletcher invited her to the Gazette to watch what was coming in on the wires. Associated Press did not use those quotations or identifications but carried an abbreviated narrative of the drama in the death room, which, to Viridis’ delight, was running nationwide, including the huge newspapers on both coasts. And the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, proud that one of its own reporters had been instrumental in stopping the execution, gave an entire page of detailed coverage, in addition to an editorial commending Viridis for her “dedication and bravery in the face of a politician’s cronyism and malevolence.”
Tom Fletcher shook his head and said, “Don’t be surprised if you hear from the governor.” So she was not surprised when she did, except by her treatment: she was not called to the capitol to wait for hours in His Excellency’s marble-walled, marble-floored, marble-ceilinged anteroom and then to stand on the carpet in front of his huge desk and listen to his rantings. No, he invited her to dinner at the governor’s mansion, which, although the governor belittled it as “just an old-fashioned big old pile of dark-red bricks,” was one of the city’s finer homes. The governor himself met her at the door and shook her hand with both of his, and introduced her to his wife Ida and his sons Grady and Bill, eighteen and ten years respectively. The five of them sat down evenly spaced around a dining-table that could seat thirty, lit by candles, and attended by eight black waiters. Later Viridis could not even remember what the food had been; it had not been outstanding, nor had the wine, a sweet red that would have been all right with the dessert. The governor and his family ate very rapidly, scarcely pausing between bites to make conversation about insignificant things: as near as she could recall, they had talked about the latest improved passenger cars on railroads and the opening of the new movie theater at Eighth and Main, the Crystal, where they were showing a gripping oriental mystery story, Bombay Buddha; everyone had seen it except poor Billy, whose mother wouldn’t let him. They argued about whether or not the movie was dangerous for a ten-year-old boy. When they finally asked Viridis her opinion, she replied that she couldn’t say, since she hadn’t seen it herself.
Trying to be nice, she noted that young Grady was not much older than Ernest Bodenhammer and would perhaps be interested in meeting the boy and seeing his artwork. “Artwork?” Grady asked, with a belligerent frown, and then: “Who’s Ernest Bodenhammer?”
“A convict,” the governor told his son. “Miss Monday, you see, makes a hobby of convicts.”
“Oh,” said Grady. “Why does he do artwork?”
“A hobby,” Viridis said.
As soon as the dinner was finished, the governor dismissed his family and moved from his chair at the head of the table to sit next to Viridis at the side. “Now,” he said, when they were alone, and only one waiter remained, to bring them some peach brandy. “Now, I want us to be friends. I have been thinking a lot about the last time we got together, and I think I owe you more than just an apology for my rudeness. I want you to understand that I was preoccupied with the Hot Springs business. Have you been keeping up with this matter of legalized gambling?”
She shook her head. “I’ve been preoccupied myself.”
The governor laughed. “You certainly have! Trying to save that moonshiner must have been a full-time occupation for you! But anyway, some of my best friends want to legalize pari-mutuel betting at the racetrack over at Hot Springs. Would you want me to let them do a thing like that?”
“They’ve been doing that at Longchamp for centuries,” she said.
“Where is Lone John?”
“Longchamp,” she pronounced it more carefully. “In Paris. A racetrack in the Bois de Boulogne.”
“You’ve been to Paris?”
“I lived there for four years.”
“My, my,” the governor said. “Well now, I’ll be.” He didn’t say what he would be. “And your father gave you his blessing?”
“He didn’t stop me.”
“Well, that’s amazing. But you know, I’m all in favor of taking the reins and bridle off of womenfolk and letting them run free. During my administration the lot of the fair sex has improved one hundred percent. I’ve reduced the women’s working hours to a nine-hour maximum for a maximum of six days of week; that’s only fifty-four hours a week. And my legislature has given you the right to enter into contracts and to own property in your own names.”
“We’re grateful, I’m sure.”
“And one of these days soon we’re going to submit to the voters a women’s-suffrage amendment and see if we can’t get you ladies a bigger voice, at least in the local polls.”
“The fair sex will be your slaves.”
“I’m only acting on my sense of what I think the people want. I very strongly believe, Miss Monday, that the State is the sum total of the will of the people. And now, that is why I must give my full support to capital punishment, however barbarous it may seem. Personally, I do not condone capital punishment. No, I do not. At best, it is a relic of mankind’s slow, painful rise out of the Dark Ages. But if the State did not take upon itself the awesome responsibility for executing murderers and rapists, the people themselves would resort to mob violence and lynching.”
“Did you know, Governor, that Arkansas is one of the very few states that still punish rape with the death penalty?”
“Of course I know it! You mean, still punishes white men with death. Every state still executes nigras for rape. Young lady, don’t try to tell me about Arkansas in relation to the other states. That’s the main reason I wanted to see you. This past week the state of Arkansas has become the butt of national derision and even contempt because of this Chism business. Just at a time in our history when we’re making some progress toward correcting the country’s notion that Arkansas is nothing but a barnyard full of rustic buffoons, along comes this moonshining rapist out of the Ozarks and sets us all back into ridicule!”
“Pardon me, sir, but I don’t believe it’s Nail Chism they’re ridiculing. They have focused their scorn on a chief executive who refuses to listen to overwhelming evidence that Nail Chism is innocent.”
The governor slammed his palm down on the table so forcefully that both their glasses of brandy toppled over. A black waiter hastened to handle the problem, which the governor ignored. “WHAT EVIDENCE?” he thundered, “The babble of the victim? The poor, frightened, illiterate backwoods child, driven out of her senses by a vicious assault and the most despicable rape and sexual perversion I’ve ever heard about in my long legal career, trying pathetically to undo this hideous act simply by recanting her testimony? Please, Miss Monday! It’s perfectly obvious that that pathetic waif you went to such pains to recruit to your cause is not of sound mind and not capable of testifying for or against anybody.”
“Governor, if you would let her talk to you for five minutes, you wouldn’t say that.”
The governor softened his voice. “Let me tell you a little story, Miss Monday. Not so very long ago my wife Ida and I received here at our house late one afternoon a Mrs. Ramsey, who had her little boy with her. It was not long until sundown, when the woman’s husband was scheduled to die in the electric chair at the state penitentiar
y. The woman wanted me to listen to her little boy, and wanted my wife to listen too. The boy gave the most touching speech about how he loved his daddy and what a good man his daddy was. Ida, who gave him a piece of bread and butter and a glass of milk, had tears running down her face, and she looked at me with such reproach as I had never seen from her before, and she asked, ‘George, doesn’t this little boy move you at all?’ and I said, ‘Yes, Ida, but his father moves me much more, because the man committed such a cold-blooded, brutal murder, with no extenuating circumstances whatsoever, that I still seethe to think of it.’ And at sundown they electrocuted Ramsey, the first white man I have refused to save from the electric chair. Nail Chism is the second. Let me finish. You think that I am deaf to the entreaties of good people, as my wife thought I was deaf to the little boy. But I tell you what I told her: that it devolves upon me as governor to investigate meticulously every last one of these crimes. I do not take death lightly. I will not allow a citizen of the state of Arkansas to die for any reason, unless and until I have satisfied myself that that man—and notice, dear girl, that I say ‘man,’ because I have never allowed the fair sex to be executed, and I will never permit it as long as I live—that that man is guilty beyond any shadow of doubt!”
“But the shadows of doubt are all around Nail Chism,” she said.
The governor sighed and passed his hand across his eyes. “Are you aware,” he asked, “that for seven years before becoming governor, I was a circuit judge myself? I know the burdens that Lincoln Villines faced, and I know how carefully he had to proceed in that lower court. But before I became a circuit judge, I was a farmer. I grew up on an impoverished farm in the scrub of Ouachita County, and until I was the age of Nail Chism, I was, like him, a simple farmer. Although I did not resort to the illegal manufacture of liquor to supplement my modest income, I saved my money to finance a legal education at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. No, I have not been to Paris, but I have been to Virginia, a civilized place, the home of such men as George Mason and Thomas Jefferson, men who, despite their ownership of slaves, opposed slavery and favored abolition, but who believed, as I believe, that abolition can only be accomplished very slowly and gradually, not all at once, as we learned to our regret. It is the same with capital punishment.”
The governor pointed out the lone black waiter who was still blotting up the brandy, and George W. Hays began to talk about him as if the man could not hear. “Do you think this man is ready for complete freedom? Do you think he is capable of making the wise decisions that are required by the responsibilities of citizenship? This particular individual, I happen to know, is not the low-grade type of nigra who crowds our penitentiary and our charitable institutions, but he is still quite primitive and in a childish stage of progress, not yet intelligent enough to hold public office or aspire to one of the professions, or…”
Viridis discovered that she was not paying close attention; her mind was wandering, and her gaze was straying from the governor’s face—he looked so much like an older version of Tom Fletcher, with his protruding eyeballs and thick lips—to the wallpaper, and to her own hands in her lap. The governor seemed to have arrived at the notion that there was some connection between the plight of Nail Chism and what the governor called “the most serious problem of the nigra question.” At least he did not say “nigger,” as so many did. If Viridis tried very hard, and did not drink any more peach brandy, she could focus on his words and detect that he was now discussing the achievement of his administration in separating the white and colored convicts. One of his first acts as governor was the purchase of the Tucker plantation to serve as a “white-convict farm,” wherein the exclusively white inmates could pursue their agricultural labors free from any contact with “culluds.” This, the governor attempted to explain to her, was in keeping with his “concept of the age, and well-advanced civilization.”
She interrupted. “And how would the execution of Nail Chism fit into a well-advanced civilization?”
“It would manifest the sentiment of the community that the community will not tolerate the violation of the sexual sanctity of the fair sex!”
“But the community,” Viridis pointed out, “that is, Nail Chism’s community, has given you petitions signed by four thousand people, more than half the population of Newton County, who do not believe that he violated the sexual sanctity of anyone.”
The governor was fiddling with the silverware. He picked up a dinner knife and held it as if to stab her with it and said, “Miss Monday, if I were to murder you right now, and later fifty thousand residents of Pulaski County signed a petition that I had not done it, would that make me innocent of the crime?” The governor did not wait for her answer. “No: petitions never exonerate, they only beg, and I will not lend an ear to beggary.”
“Nor will you lend an ear to anyone’s protestation that Nail Chism is innocent.”
The governor sighed again and leaned back in his chair and regarded her for a few moments before saying, “Let me ask you. You seem so convinced of the man’s absolute guiltlessness. Would you want to find yourself alone with him in that child’s playhouse, or wherever it was he raped her?”
“I would feel perfectly safe with Nail Chism.”
The governor snorted in disbelief. “You would? I’m going to call your bluff, young lady. What if I threatened to throw you into his cage?”
“Do you mean put me alone into his cell?” she asked.
“Not just that,” he said. “The man is occupying the so-called death hole down in the dungeon of the powerhouse out at the pen. It’s like solitary confinement. And it’s very dark most of the time, Miss Monday. Very dark and scary. Would you want to be locked in there with him?”
“For how long?”
“Long enough for you to beg to be let out. Long enough for you to realize just how ‘innocent’ he is. Long enough for you to cease and desist this humiliating campaign to save him from the chair.”
“Are you saying that if I shouted, somebody would come and rescue me?”
The governor chuckled. “Not quickly. Not too quickly,” he said, and let the implication sink in. “When Nail Chism tries to harm you, it will take a while for you to summon the guards. We hope. Yes, I am going to call your bluff, Miss Monday, and I am going to have you locked up with that man.”
“When?”
“I’ll talk to Warden Yeager in the morning, and—I think it probably begins to get very dark in the death hole about the middle of the afternoon. Can you go to Warden Yeager’s office at three P.M.?”
“Yes.”
The governor was startled by the quickness of her reply. “Are you absolutely sure you want to go through with this?”
“Are you sure you would let me?”
“You bet I am. I just want you to promise me that as soon as we let you out of there, you’ll leave us alone. I would even be willing to wager that you’ll be so changed in your opinion of that hillbilly pervert that you’ll gladly attend his execution, which I intend to carry out at the earliest opportunity, if I have to pull the switch myself.”
Viridis stood up. “Three P.M. Warden Yeager’s office,” she said, taking her leave.
At the door he said, “You won’t need your nightgown or your toothbrush. Good night, Miss Monday.”
She did not sleep that night. Her insomnia made her confront the question: what if she had been deluded about Nail? What if he actually was a rapist? She even imagined a scene in which he confessed that he had raped Dorinda and that he couldn’t help himself. She anticipated that he was only an apparition of the man she had loved: he smelled abominable and the cell was the filthiest place she’d ever been. Such sleeplessness forced her eventually to picture (or did she actually sleep, and dream?) the act of love they tried to make, and it was not good at all.
In the morning, as she dressed and got herself ready for the day, and then as she baked three dozen cookies (oatmeal, chocolate, and pecan) to take with her, she told herself that th
e dream, or the conscious fantasy if that’s what it had been, was just an attempt to consider, and dismiss, the worst contingencies. It would not be like that, at all. She and Nail would not even consider sex. It would defeat their purpose. They would talk, and talk, and talk, and possibly hold hands, maybe even, yes! they would kiss, although Nail himself would be very self-conscious and ill at ease because of his appearance (but it will be dark, remember?) and the fact that they hadn’t let him take a bath in ages. She would do a good job of ignoring the unsavory atmosphere.
She told no one where she was going. She told her mother that she wouldn’t be home for supper and might be gone overnight. At 2:30 P.M. she telephoned for a taxicab and rode it to the penitentiary. She was met at the visitors’ room by the sergeant with the short leg, Mr. Fancher, who escorted her out of the room across the outside length of the wall to another door, the one she had used several times before. It was a heavy, arched wooden door upon which Mr. Fancher rapped the familiar trite code, the beats of “Shave and a haircut, two bits.” A trusty opened it and admitted them to the fenced corridor leading across the Yard to the powerhouse and the main building. In the upper windows of the main building, open to the late-April air, men whistled and howled, “Hey, babe!” and, “Up here, sweetie!” and, “Sugar, come and git it!”
Mr. Fancher escorted her to the warden’s office. The new warden, Travis Don Yeager, met her at his door and invited her in. He was about fifty, and her first impression of him was slightly more favorable than that of Harris Burdell: he seemed cut from the same mold, and she guessed that he, like Burdell, must have spent countless hours in front of a mirror practicing a look of fierce determination and strength. But he tried to be polite, at first. “Welcome to the Arkansas State Penitentiary, Miss Monday!”
“I’ve been here before,” she said.
“Yeah. Right. I didn’t think.” He made a mouth that might have been intended as a smile but came out as a smirk. “We oughta send you up to Jacksonville hee hee, our state farm for women hee hee, but we understand you prefer the company of males hee hee. I see you didn’t bring your suitcase hee hee.”
The Choiring Of The Trees Page 27
