Part 17 (2/2)
”Anything except mountains and meadows and creeks and country,” he said. He shook his head again. ”No, I thank ye kindly, but I'll light out for the back of beyond. I don't mean I aim to git my old bed back, in the homeplace. But there's some hollers I know up on the mountain where aint n.o.body ever been, except Indians. Places where n.o.body could find me.”
”Could I find you?”
”Not if I didn't draw ye a map.”
”Draw me a map.”
”When the time comes. I aint leavin tonight. First I've got to figger some way to git upstairs from the death hole in the middle of the night.”
”Whatch'all talkin about?” Bird said, and they looked up to see him leaning over them. Had he been listening? Had he heard anything they said? Would he snitch? Nail grew very anxious. But Bird was simply intent on announcing, ”Y'all just got about five minutes left.”
”All right,” Viridis said. Bird backed away to his guard spot, and they went on talking. Viridis said, ”I hope you don't mind if I visit with Ernest after you leave.”
”Mind?” he said. ”Course I don't mind. You know he don't have no folks to visit him from up home, where he comes from, up around Timbo. You gonna kiss him too?”
”I just want to talk about his drawings,” she said. ”Has he started using his pastels yet?”
”Those colored chalks? Yeah, he's covered a new pad with 'em. Did you bring back his old pad?”
She shook her head. ”Does he need it? I had most of those framed to show to people to help save him from the chair.”
Nail said, ”There's one of them I hope you didn't have framed. Ernest forgot it was in the pad, and he sure was mortified at the thought you seen it.”
It was her turn to blush. He was glad to see that she could. She'd caused him so many blushes. ”No,” she said. ”I'm not showing that to anyone. Who is the girl?”
”What girl?”
”That he drew you in bed with.”
”What makes you think it was me?”
”Nail. It looks just like you.”
”He's sh.o.r.e a good artist, aint he?”
”Who's the girl?”
”Aw, she's jist some story I tole him. There wasn't never n.o.body like that. He jist made her up. I mean, I jist made her up, and he jist drew her.”
”You've never been to bed with a girl?”
”Sorry, y'all's time is up,” Bird said, and handed her a basket. ”Lady, you can give 'im this now.”
Viridis had brought him a basket of goodies, which had gone through an inspection by another trusty-guard in the anteroom. It contained fruit, cookies, men's hosiery, underclothes, handkerchiefs, books, packages of chewing-gum. Bird said to her, ”You hid two things in there that's not allowed, and you can pick 'em up outside. He can't have that harmonica, and he can't have that letter.”
”Oh, dear,” Viridis said. ”Well, that's too bad.”
”You can just mail him the letter,” Bird suggested. ”But I don't know about that harmonica. They prolly wouldn't let him keep it, on account of before.”
”I guess I'll have to say good-bye,” Viridis said. ”I can't say anything else.” Nail saw why she couldn't say anything else: she had put something into her mouth. Pretending to wipe her lips in preparation for a parting kiss, she put the padlock key into her mouth. Bird wasn't paying much attention anyway; kissing seemed to make him squirm. They leaned across the table, and again Nail felt the spark of their lips meeting, and wondered if the Rowland book had any explanation for that. Her lips parted, and the key came through them, between his, into his mouth. Suddenly he was aware of a tightening in his pants. He took the key into his mouth and, unable to talk, nodded his head good-bye to her. Later he wished he had thought to tell her he loved her before he got the key in his mouth. He had planned to say so during the meeting but never did.
Ernest came back to the death hole from his fifteen minutes with Viridis more cheerful than Nail had ever seen him. He had got permission from the trusties to pa.s.s the new sketchbook across to her, and they had talked about his pastel drawings, which were considerably more complicated than the black-and-whites he had been doing. Viridis had made a few suggestions but mostly had just complimented him, and had said ”Ooh” or ”Ahh” as she turned the pages, and just made him feel real good watching her eyes and her face as she looked at his work. She had also brought him a basket, with pretty much the same things she'd brought Nail-”enough cookies to choke a horse”-as well as a couple of art books, Advanced Pastel Techniques and Great Drawings of the Masters.
That night Nail went through the basket Viridis had brought him. It was better than Christmas. He ate an apple and wanted to eat a banana too, but he saved it. He chewed some of the chewing-gum. He opened the books; there were three of them: a clean, revised edition of Dr. Hood, big and thick and fancy-bound, with new chapters he hadn't read before, on things like unhappy marriages and how to avoid them, how to raise children, and so on; there was a new book called Tender b.u.t.tons by a lady named Gertrude Stein; and there was a slender little book of poems, called Irradiations: Sand and Spray, by John Gould Fletcher. Nail opened it to the flyleaf and read: To Nail Chism, a brave Arkansawyer, whose story will take more pages than this book.
With ineffable admiration, John Gould Fletcher Beneath the fancy ink of that inscription there was written in pencil in Viridis' hand: ”He is the cousin of my ex-boss, and grew up in Little Rock, lives now in London, but has read all the newspaper stories about you, and thinks the world of you.” Beneath that in blacker pencil someone had block-printed: WRITING STUFF IN BOOKS IS AGAINST RULES OF THIS PRISON.
Nail had been required by his teacher at the Stay More school to read poetry, but he hadn't particularly cared for it or had time for it. Now that he had a lot of time, he read Mr. Fletcher's verse cover to back, and then back to cover. There weren't any rhymes in it, and Mr. Fletcher seemed to get overexcited at times, but he had a good way of putting things, and Nail understood what he was saying. There was one long poem, called ”Green Symphony,” that was mostly about trees, and Nail appreciated such lines as: The trees splash the sky with their fingers, A restless green rout of stars.
and: The trees lash the sky with their leaves, Uneasily shaking their dark green manes.
A good poem, Nail reflected, ought to make you want to see it yourself, and he wanted to see those trees...or any trees. That time Dempsey had taken him to fix the wiring in the warden's house, Nail had glimpsed the trees on the warden's lawn, the first he had seen for eight months.
He wanted to watch some trees somewhere splas.h.i.+ng the sky with their fingers and shaking their dark-green manes.
Since the painting of the death hole was all finished, they had Ernest build four more cells. They gave him the cement and the concrete blocks and the tools and finally brought him four ready-made barred doors, and all by himself Ernest built four more death cells, each of them only four feet wide by seven feet deep, and he painted those too, making a total of six cells for the death hole, and pretty soon three of the new cells were filled: there was Sam Bell, who had been convicted of killing four members of his divorced wife's family; and, briefly, two black men who had been convicted of killing their bosses, but they hardly stayed long enough for Nail to learn their names before the governor commuted them to life imprisonment and sent them to c.u.mmins in order to make room for Clarence Dewein and Joe Short, two young white men not much older than Ernest, who had killed a storekeeper together, or one of them had done the shooting while the other robbed the man. The population of the death hole was five. There would have been even more than that, according to the Gazette, except for all the publicity about Nail, which had made juries all over the state reluctant to send men to the electric chair, exercising instead their new option for sentences of life imprisonment.
Warden Yeager summoned Nail to his office, had Short Leg unlock the handcuffs, and offered Nail a cigarette, which he declined. ”Gettin kind of crowded down there, aint it hee hee?” the warden observed or asked.
”Yessir,” Nail agreed. ”I don't think that hole was meant to hold that many.”
”But we don't keep you down there. You doin a good job upstairs with Dempsey, I hear hee hee. A good job, he tells me. Learnin a lot.”
”Thank you, sir.”
”Are you happy, Chism?” the warden asked. ”Is there anything we could do for you?”
Nail thought. ”Well, sir,” he said, ”you know that empty piece of the Yard on the east side of the powerhouse? Could I put me a mater patch in it?”
”A mater patch?” the warden asked.
”Yeah, and grow...to-maters? It's a shame to let a piece of land jist go to waste out there in the Yard, that the men don't walk on or nothin.
”I could grow enough maters on that piece to feed the prison, come August and September, if you could git me the plants.”
”Well, why not?” the warden said. ”I'll get some n.i.g.g.e.rs out there to spade it up for you. You need some fertilizer too. That's a good idea. How many plants you need?”
”I reckon fifty or so ought to be all it could hold.”
”We'll sure do it, then, Chism. Would that make you happy?”
”It would help.”
They gave Nail his tomato patch. It was really late in the year to be planting tomatoes, but the plants the warden got were kind of old and leggy anyhow, and Nail planted them deep. While Nail was cultivating them one afternoon, the warden came out there with three other fellows, all of them dressed in suits with straw hats. Nail was wearing a straw hat too, but it wasn't fancy, and he took it off. One of the men was a black man, and he was dressed the best. The only one Nail recognized was that local sheriff who had arrested Ernest and had come with the governor to his last execution.
”Chism,” the warden said, ”these here are some gentlemen would like to talk to you. This is Mr. George Donaghey, who used to be our governor, and this is the Reverend Dr. Alonzo Monk of the AME church, and I believe you've met Sheriff Bill Hutton. Now these men are gonna ask you some questions. Governor Hays has appointed them a commission to inspect and investigate the prison, and I want you to tell 'em just what you think, okay?”
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