“Here’s the pitch,” Bobo told her and directed her eyes toward the field, where a man was winding up his body into a leg-lifted dance. The man threw the ball, and Bobo stood up, yelling, “That was a clean strike, goddammit! ’scuse me.”
She stood alongside him. He was actually shorter than her. “A clean strike, goddammit,” she agreed.
They sat down, and she began unscrewing the cap on the bottle. Irvin Bobo was looking around to see if any neighbors were watching. “We aint supposed to drink in the ballpark,” he informed her. “And I don’t drink anyhow except before I have to do a job.”
“You’ve got two jobs to do tonight,” she reminded him. She brought out of her handbag two small metal jiggers and demonstrated how it was possible to hold and drink one inconspicuously.
In the course of the afternoon Viridis measured out nearly the whole quart of bourbon to Irvin Bobo, retaining only enough in her own jigger to give the semblance of conviviality. She even learned a few things about baseball: the manager has to decide whether to leave a pitcher in even if the pitcher is getting killed.
In the second game of the doubleheader Irvin Bobo began to lose interest, although the Travelers were winning. He tried to watch the field with one eye closed and then the other, but he could not see the field clearly. All he could see was the jigger in his hand, which she kept full. “You called me a monster,” he mumbled.
She asked him what he had said, and he mumbled it again, and she recalled having said that. She patted his knee and left her hand there while she apologized. “I didn’t mean you. I meant that awful boss of yours, Warden Burdell.”
“Yeah, now he was a monster,” Bobo agreed.
“He shouldn’t have tried to make you kill a white man,” she sympathized. “That wasn’t fair.”
“No, it sure wudn’t. Burdell was a bastud.”
“He’s gone,” she reminded him. “Yeager won’t make you kill a white man.”
Irvin Bobo made a sound that, she guessed, was the best approximation of a laugh he could manage. “I gotta choose who they tell me to choose,” he said, or she thought he said, not hearing him clearly. Thinking about his words, she realized that he had not said “choose” but “juice.” I gotta choose who they tell me to choose, she told herself.
The Travelers won the second game of the doubleheader, but Irvin Bobo was past cheering. He was even, she discovered, past standing. She had to hold him up. She hoped he had not driven to the ballpark; he had not, and intended to walk home. It wasn’t far. Less than a mile. She offered to get a taxicab. He insisted on walking, but he fell down twice before he could get out of the park. She helped him up, dusted him off, called a taxicab, and took him home.
“Did anyone ever tell you that you look just like Charlie Chaplin?” she asked him.
“Who?” he asked, but she did not repeat herself. She realized he had never been to the movies.
In his room she offered to prepare some supper for him, but he said he wasn’t hungry, he’d just like another little drink if she had any left, and if she didn’t he had a pint somewhere around here. She told him that if he drank any more, he wouldn’t be able to walk to the penitentiary, even though it was only a short distance down the road. He would have to eat something. In his cupboard she found a loaf of bread and a bologna sausage, which she sliced, and made three sandwiches, two for him, one for herself. She considered making coffee but then decided she didn’t want him any more sober than he was now.
Making conversation to keep him paying attention, she asked, “How much do they pay you for a job?”
“Fiff dahs,” he said.
“Only five?” she said.
“Fiffy,” he said. “Fiffy dahs.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s a lot. Tonight you’ll make a hundred dollars.”
“Doanwannit,” he insisted. “Doanwannit.”
She had to use the bathroom. When she returned, he was sitting on the edge of his bed, tilting up a pint bottle of his own whiskey and letting it run down his throat. “Hey!” she said, and moved to stop him. “You’ve had enough of that, now. You won’t be able to walk to work.”
“Doanwanna. Doanwanna.” He groaned these sounds, then he fell over on the bed and passed out. She shook him, and shook him harder, but could not rouse him. She glanced at the clock on the table. It was almost five. Two hours to sundown. Probably, the executioner was expected to be on the job half an hour before. She made a pot of coffee but couldn’t get him to wake up and drink it. She drank some herself.
She sat on the edge of the bed beside his flopped-out body, thinking. In all truth, in all veritas, Viridis Monday was no closer to a decision than when she had walked out of the governor’s office. She sat on the bed of Irvin Bobo until she had determined he probably would sleep a long time. Then she knew what she had to do.
On
He protested when they tried to shave him again. Hell, it had only been ten days since they’d shaved him last, and he’d hardly had time to regrow anything but peach fuzz. He didn’t mind so much being made bald as a doorknob for the third time, but he hated the goddamn trusty-barber, who couldn’t hold his hand steady enough to keep from slashing his scalp. The barber had done a bad job on Ernest, Nail could tell just by listening. Ernest hadn’t liked it at all. The kid wasn’t the least bit vain about his mop of red hair, and he had surprised Nail with his ideas about facing death calmly because we all have to go sooner or later, but he yelled at Fat Gill, “I been a-cuttin my own hair since I was five year old, and aint nobody else never touched it! Give me that there razor, and I’ll do it myself!” Fat Gill had guffawed at the thought that they’d be dumb enough to let the boy get hold of the razor. Nail, listening, had determined that Fat Gill and Short Leg were both required to hold Ernest down while the barber shaved him. They wouldn’t have to hold Ernest when they put him in Old Sparky…not unless they did Nail first and made Ernest watch, and if they did that, Ernest might easily get mad or scared and start fighting. Nobody would tell them which one was going first. Maybe they’d flip a coin at the last minute. Nail hoped that he could go last, simply because he had enough experience to bear watching Ernest get it, in a way that wouldn’t be so the other way around. But try explaining this to anybody. Of course there was always a chance that Viridis had got all of those newspapermen to come back again, but Nail doubted it. He had spent a good bit of time trying to imagine how Viridis might save him this time, but he hadn’t been able to come up with a single blessèd notion, although he wouldn’t put any thing past her: she might even set fire to the whole penitentiary to stop them. He was a little surprised at himself for being so inwardly calm, so resigned; it wasn’t because he had any hope of once again being saved at the last minute but because he knew he would not be, and the only way to take it, this time, was to accept what Ernest had been preaching at him for several days now: “We ort not to fear nothin, not even that black thing they call death. Me and you will jist not be no more, but the whole world won’t be neither. It will go with us, Nail. The whole world will die when we die, don’t ye see? But it has to die sooner or later, I reckon, just as we’uns all do, so one time is about as good as another. That’s all time is. One time is as good as another.” The twelve witnesses, whoever they were this time, were sure going to be surprised to see both of them going to the chair so calmly. If the twelve witnesses were expecting any excitement from either one of them, they were going to be in for a letdown.
But there weren’t going to be twelve witnesses, or even nine. When the head-shaving was finished, the new warden himself came down into the death hole. Yeager had impressed Nail as just maybe a little bit nicer than Burdell, although Nail knew that any man who had been the boss at Tucker Farm had to be plenty tough, or else numbskulled, and Nail hadn’t seen enough of him to know which. Now Yeager was saying, “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” and Nail couldn’t tell whether he was saying “gentlemen” politely and friendly-like or just being sarcastic.
Nail hear
d Ernest say, “Howdy, Warden.” Nail just nodded his head at the warden politely, and the warden could see him, because they now had electricity down in the hole; or at least they had wired up one bulb that gave some illumination to the basement. It was one of the new warden’s “improvements.” Now they learned of another: the warden was offering them a “last meal.” “Just anything you want to eat hee hee,” the warden said, the end of his sentence sounding like some kind of half-cough, half-laugh.
At neither one of Nail’s previously scheduled executions had they offered him anything special to eat, or any special treatment, not even a final cigarette. He hadn’t had a smoke now for six months, and no longer craved one. He wondered where the warden got this idea of a special “last meal.” Probably he’d heard it was what they did in Tennessee or some civilized place. “Wal, I reckon I could set my teeth into a platter of chicken’n dumplins,” Nail said.
“Me, I’d like a real honest beefsteak,” Ernest said. “I aint never et me one of them afore.”
“We’ll see what we can do about them dumplins hee hee,” said Yeager. “Now, you boys ought to know somethin about tonight’s little entertainment hee hee. So I’m gonna tell y’all. First off, there won’t be no pack of reporters like last time. Just one, from the Gazette. Second off, there won’t be no twelve witnesses. New law says not but six, so that’s all y’all will get, okay?” The warden waited to see if either of them would comment on the new law, but neither of them did. “And third off hee hee,” the warden resumed, “there is a real good chance that the governor hisself will show up. I can’t promise nothin, but yes, I do believe he might appear, so I want you boys to behave yourselfs and be gentlemen, okay?” Nail nodded, and, since he heard nothing from the other cell, he assumed that Ernest was nodding also. “Now, if the governor does show up, I don’t want y’all to start in to yappin at him about clemency or nothin like that. He’s done made up his mind, and if y’all start beggin him and beggin him, it’ll just embarrass all of us hee hee. So I want y’all to just keep quiet, okay?” Again Nail assented by nodding. “Of course hee hee, if y’all want to holler when the power comes on, y’all just go ahead and holler, won’t nobody care. That’s expected of y’all anyhow hee hee, aint it?” Nail took the question to be rhetorical and did not even nod. The new warden went on, “I aint never watched a execution before, myself. You have, aint you, Chism?” Nail nodded. “Don’t you men that get executed generally start in to carryin on and screamin and all, hee hee?”
“Sometimes,” Nail said, and then asked, “Which one of us are ye aimin to do first?”
“Good question, Chism hee hee,” Yeager said. “I really aint given it no thought. Got any preference hee hee?”
“I’d ’preciate it if you’d do him first,” Nail said.
Nail heard Ernest agree. “Yeah, do me first. I don’t want to watch you’uns do Nail.”
The warden looked back and forth between the two of them in their separate cells, trying to stand midway between them. He leaned toward Nail and asked, “You scared to go first? Or you still think somebody’s gonna save you a third time hee hee?”
“Nossir, I jist don’t want Ernest to have to watch me.”
“Let me think about it,” the warden said. “I caint promise nothin hee hee.” He went back upstairs.
Later in the afternoon Jimmie Mac came, but he was still pretending that Nail didn’t exist. He only wanted to see if Ernest was ready to be baptized. He had been working on Ernest all week, trying to baptize him. Jimmie Mac had even got to the point where he was willing to go ahead and baptize Ernest even if Ernest would not confess and repent. He wanted to make one last effort. “Son, just a few more hours and you’ll stand there at those pearl-studded gates and they won’t let you in,” he said. Nail couldn’t hear what-all Ernest was replying, but it took him a while. They went on talking in the next cell. Ernest had told Nail that up around Timbo where he came from everybody thought you had to be totally immersed in water to be saved, and there wasn’t noplace around this pen where they could totally immerse you, and he didn’t care to be sprinkled, although he didn’t exactly mind it neither, it probably wasn’t any worse than getting your head shaved. Finally Nail heard Jimmie Mac saying, “Son, you’ll never regret this,” and then some more talking, and then Jimmie Mac said real loud, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, amen,” and then it was silent for a while before Jimmie Mac asked, “Don’t you feel like shouting?” Nail didn’t hear what Ernest answered, but it wasn’t a shout.
At suppertime, sure enough, they brought Nail a platter of chicken and dumplings, and Ernest an honest-to-God porterhouse with all the trimmings. Those prison folks in Tennessee, or wherever it was, sure had the right idea. As Ernest put it, “By gonnies, I’d let ’em ’lectercute me ever night if they’d feed me like this aforehand.”
They weren’t given any time after supper to sit around on the porch and shoot the breeze or watch the hound dog chew his tail. Warden Yeager returned, accompanied by Fat Gill, Short Leg, and a couple of armed black trusties. Was it time already to go upstairs? Warden Yeager said, “Well now, gentlemen hee hee, not that I don’t take your word for it that you’ll be orderly during these proceedings, but just to be safe hee hee we are going to have to search you. Take off your hee hee clothes.”
They opened the cell doors and made Nail and Ernest strip down naked. Of course Nail had anticipated this and had nothing around his neck except the tree charm. Warden Yeager fingered the tree charm, turning it over and even squinting at the inscription on the back of it. He decided to let Nail wear it but nothing else. They took away his clothes and turned the cell upside down looking for his blade. They tore up his Bible and ripped up the bed. It was Warden Yeager, maybe not so numbskulled after all, who realized it was inside the harmonica, where it had originated; he took the harmonica apart and removed the dagger and held it up in front of Nail’s face and said, “Mister, does this belong to you, any chance hee hee?” Nail did not answer. The warden began to shake—out of checked anger, Nail thought at first, but then decided the warden was shaking the way you do when you’ve had a narrow escape. “Maybe we’ll make you go first hee hee,” the warden said, and Nail realized something else: whenever the warden made that sound “hee hee” it wasn’t because he didn’t know whether to laugh or to cough but because he was just real nervous. Yeah, T.D. Yeager was sure one nervous feller.
Jimmie Mac returned and said it was time for them to leave their cells. “Why, howdy, Nail,” Ernest said at the sight of naked Nail standing handcuffed outside his door. “I aint seen you in a coon’s age. Do I look as bad as you do?” Yes, it had been all of a month since they’d last laid eyes on each other, although they had talked so much they hardly had anything left to say, and yes, Ernest looked pretty awful with his red hair all gone except around his pecker. Now it was Ernest who began to protest to the guards, “Hey! Aint you gonna give us our clothes back? We caint go up thar nekkid as the day we was born! What if they’s a lady present?”
“They aint no lady present,” Fat Gill assured them. Nail sighed with relief, and soon saw what he meant: among the few witnesses there was no woman, no Viridis, not yet anyhow, and he hoped she would never come. Even if she did, they wouldn’t let her into the room as long as he and Ernest had their peckers a-hanging down. There wasn’t no governor neither. Just five strangers…well, one of them he had seen before, a newspaperman who’d been here the last time. He was the only one of the five who looked like he cared, and he was raising his eyebrows at the sight of these two convicts stark-naked. The death room was still illuminated only by the light from that one green-shaded bulb up near the ceiling, so it wasn’t as if their genitals were exposed to harsh spotlight. In such darkness Nail didn’t even feel naked.
Warden Yeager explained to the newspaperman, “We aint takin any chances this time hee hee. Were you here when the last warden had a little problem?”
“Yes, I was,” the newspaperman sai
d. “Well, ‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither.’”
“What’s that from?” the warden asked.
Jimmie Mac butted in. “The Bible. Book of Job, one and twenty-one. ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessèd be the name of the Lord.’ And the Good Book goes on, next chapter, ‘Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life.’”
The warden looked at Jimmie Mac uncertainly and asked, “Are you supposed to say a lot?”
“Just the final prayer,” Jimmie Mac informed him, clearly liking the position of telling the new warden what was what.
“I aint been through this before,” the warden declared, as if anybody needed to be told. “Do you say the final prayer now, or do we wait till Bobo gets here?”
The newspaperman spoke up. “We ought to wait till the governor gets here.” He’d hardly said those words when the turnkey opened the guests’ door, and in walked a man who surely was the governor, with another man who looked like he must be the local sheriff, and a third man who must be the governor’s bodyguard.
“Good heavens!” said the man who must be governor, and accosted the warden, demanding, “Why are these men naked?”
“We found that blade, Your Honor hee hee,” Yeager said. “I thought we would, and we stripped ’em and searched ’em to be sure, and Chism had a blade. I found it hee hee.”
“Well, why are they just standing around like that?” the governor asked. He was more nervous than the warden, and looked like he was hunting for a place to relieve himself. “Why don’t you do something?”
The Choiring Of The Trees Page 30
