The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [116]
It was so quiet in the room that you could hear the electric dynamo hum. At least, Tom Fletcher thought it was the dynamo, but he wasn’t so sure.
Nobody answered the warden, who looked defiantly around him as if expecting an answer. “We all knew what was coming next,” Tom said. Warden Burdell moved toward Chism, saying, “Fortunately, we got him strapped into the chair before he could get his knife out and use it on us. But let’s have a look at it and see how lethal it is!”
With a flourish the warden reached out and grabbed Nail Chism by the collar of his shirt and literally ripped the shirt completely away, exposing Nail Chism’s bare chest and the string around his neck. But there was no dagger on the string—just some kind of small medallion, or ornament, which looked like a watch fob in the form of a…perhaps of a tree.
And what he had thought was the hum of the dynamo, Tom Fletcher decided, wonderingly, was some peculiar kind of remote, faraway singing, as if a choir were down the hill outside The Walls, or, no, not down the hill but somewhere up in the trees.
The gentleman from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch stood up for a third time and finished reading his story: “‘A display of last-minute theatrics by the overwrought warden failed to convince the members of the press that the innocent man was in fact a desperate cutthroat. The warden seemed completely dumbfounded when the dagger he intended to reveal failed to materialize. He looked unbelievingly at Nail Chism’s bare chest, then even looked behind Mr. Chism, as if the missing dagger might be hanging down his back. Then the warden looked at the reporters in consternation. Most of those present were laughing at him. Apparently, laughter would militate against any order for the execution to be carried out, and it was not. The flustered warden fled from the room, declaring, as his last words, that he wanted to talk to the governor.’”
Off
Off they trooped to the Monday house on Arch Street and had a party. She had planned it well in advance—planned it twice, in two different ways: If the execution took place, they would bring the body here, and she would wash it and dress it in a suit of her father’s clothes and prepare it for burial in a plot she’d bought in Mt. Holly Cemetery, just a few blocks down the street. If the execution did not take place, and it did not, the men responsible for preventing it would come here to this house to celebrate, to see the suit of her father’s clothes draped over the sofa and hear her explanation of it, and to put that into their stories if they wished. Wasn’t that the sort of “local color” they sought?
She had even ordered the champagne, and had a case of it on ice in the kitchen. Call her overconfident. Or at least say that she was so very hopeful and faithful that she had not even paused to consider how to dispose of the champagne if it were not usable. Give it away? Pour it down the sink? Probably after the funeral she would have consumed several bottles of it quickly all by herself, hoping it would kill her, but it is important, gentlemen, to put into your stories that she had not even given a thought to what she would do with the champagne. As it turned out, very happily, she gave it to you, all you could drink.
And they drank past midnight. Only one of them, the Globe-Democrat, was a teetotaler