The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [100]
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 said, “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.
Then he wrote:
I reckon you know that if they try to electercute me I aim to kill as many as I can beforehand and I reckon you also know how I aim to do it. But I have been thinking (which of course is what we all of us do too much of around this place) and have decided that if I’m going to die in that way, I might as well make one honest attempt at getting out of here before they even put me back in the death hole, which it don’t look like they plan to do until the week before the electercution date. Before they put me back in the death hole, I think I know a pretty good way to break out of here, and I can do it all by myself if you could find some way to do just one thing for me. I need a little bit of mustard oil, just enough of it to smear on my feet to throw the dogs off my scent when I light out for the country. If there was some way you could smuggle me just a tiny bottle of that mustard oil.
But if you can’t, and I have to go sit down in the chair on the 20th, I want you to promise me that you won’t come and watch. I couldn’t stand that. I sure would like to see you again before I close my eyes for the last time, and to tell the honest truth I’d like to still see nothing else except your beautiful face behind my closed eyes for eternity, but I don’t want that to be the last thing I see before I close my eyes, I want to imagine it, I want to create you, I want to be able to