The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [115]
There was a silence then. The reporters waited for him to continue, but he did not. Warden Burdell asked him, “Was them your last words, Chism?”
“No,” he said. “It’s these: tell her that I and the trees will love her forevermore.”
“Okay, boys, strap him in,” Warden Burdell said to the two guards, and they took him to the electric chair and made him sit down, and the guard named Gorham unlocked his handcuffs while the guard named Fancher secured one of his arms with an old black strap of leather that seemed to have been cut from mule harness. Chism made a brief move as if to struggle, but the warden himself nervously helped them hold him until the strapping of his arms, and then his legs, was completed. The warden whispered to the condemned man something that the reporters could not hear. Then he looked at the executioner and asked, “Ready, Bobo?”
Mr. Irvin Bobo, despite his intoxication, was lucid enough to point out something to the warden: “You aint put the cap on him yet, boss.”
“Oh,” said Burdell. “Right.” He motioned to the guard with the short leg to set the metal cap atop the head of the condemned man and strap it in place beneath his chin. “There, now.” Tom Fletcher experienced a sympathetic shiver as the steel cap touched the man’s shaved head. The warden and the guards stepped away from the chair. Mr. Bobo raised a hand to hold the switch-handle.
The man from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch stood up again and began to read: “‘The State of Arkansas last night put to death in its electric chair an innocent man, Nail Chism, twenty-seven. He had been tried and convicted of assaulting a young white woman who later confessed that he was wrongly convicted on her testimony. Appeals to Governor George W. Hays failed to gain a pardon or even to stay the execution. Last-minute appeals were made by a delegation of newspapermen directly to the warden of the state penitentiary, Harris Burdell, but Mr. Burdell remained unconvinced that the unfavorable publicity resulting would probably cost him his job…’”
“Awright, goddammit!” Burdell yelled, and grew very red in the face and stood in front of the press gallery with his hands on his hips and said, “You guys are makin it very difficult for me to exercise my sworn duties! Time and time again I’ve told you that I don’t have any power whatsoever to stop this execution, and I’m not goin to stop it!” He turned and gestured. “Bobo, put your hand back on that switch!” The warden pointed his trembling finger at the condemned man. “Y’all keep talkin about him bein so innocent! Let me just show you gentlemen how innocent he is! That business he kept yappin about, about his punk pal Timbo Red Bodenhammer killin one of my men, was on account of a letter he tried to smuggle out of my prison, tryin to get it out to that same sweetheart of his he keeps talkin about, Miss Viridis Monday, in which he told her, and I quote!” The warden fished into each of his coat pockets before he found the letter he was looking for, then began to read from it, first fumbling with his spectacles to get them into place. “‘I reckon you know that if they try to electercute’—that’s sic, gentlemen, sic—‘electercute me I aim to kill as many as I can beforehand and I reckon you also know how I aim to do it.’ Now, gentlemen, we managed to intercept this threatening letter, at the sacrifice of the life of my best guard, and I have been careful to keep a close watch on this man Chism and attempt to determine just how he intended to kill as many of us as he could. That means you too, gentlemen. He intended to kill as many of you as he could. And how did he intend to do it?”
The warden let his rhetorical question hang in the air defiantly for a long moment. Several of the reporters were attempting to write down the warden’s words as fast as he spoke, and he was speaking very fast: “I’ll tell you how! We discovered that the past several