The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [118]
Tom Fletcher was the last to leave. Each of the newsmen, before leaving, thanked her not just for the party but for having invited them to Little Rock. She thanked each of them for having demonstrated the power of the Fourth Estate not simply to report events but to exert an influence on them. Then she was left to deal with Tom. She had drunk too much champagne. And, clearly, so too had he. She was still miffed at him, his earlier abandonment of her project, his refusal to let her or any of the Gazette’s other reporters spend any more time on what he had called “a lost cause,” and now his Johnny-come-lately enthusiasm and interloping after she had gone to such great lengths to attract the out-of-state journalists to Little Rock. Some of his remarks this evening had clearly betrayed his envy of the larger newspapers represented here. And he had also said things to indicate he still considered Nail Chism an ignorant, grubby peasant. She had overheard him asking Dorinda, “But aren’t you glad it wasn’t him?” She had not heard Dorinda’s reply.
Now Tom, tipsy and hanging back until the others were gone and her family had gone to bed, began to hint that he’d like to stay the night. She was too tired and too intoxicated to care, really, and her room was private enough, with its own entrance (or, rather, exit), for Tom to escape in the morning without anyone else in the house knowing about it. But she couldn’t let him. She was still sufficiently sober to be faithful, with the same faithfulness that had saved a man from death tonight. She turned Tom away.
“You’re in love with him, aren’t you?” he said peevishly but unbelievingly, as he retreated.
She stared at him. She knew he would think less of her if she confessed, but perhaps it was time he began to think less of her. She confessed, “Maybe I am.”
She was still nursing a hangover the next afternoon when the Kansas City Star arrived in a taxicab to take her out to the penitentiary, where he intended to demand an interview with Ernest Bodenhammer. She was all excited, riding out there; maybe she’d get to see Nail too. Maybe Burdell would be so intimidated and submissive as a result of last night’s incident that he would permit her to visit Nail without the intervening screen of the visitors’ room.
But Burdell wasn’t there. His office was occupied by the new sergeant, a mere guard, Gillespie Gorham, who impressed Viridis as more repulsive than the guard he had replaced. No, he wasn’t taking Burdell’s office permanently, he was just holding down the fort until the new warden came up from Tucker. Yes, Burdell had been fired. No, the governor couldn’t fire him, but the prison board could, and the governor had appointed the prison board. Until the new warden, Superintendent T.D. Yeager of Tucker Farm, arrived to take over, probably by the end of this week, Sergeant Gorham was not going to let nobody do nothing. So for them to even ask to see Ernest Bodenhammer or his “scribbles” was out of the question. The Kansas City Star had to catch a train for home, and said he hoped Viridis would let him arrange a show of her work in a good K.C. gallery.
The Arkansas Democrat, an evening paper, scooped the Gazette with the front-page story under the headline GOVERNOR ‘FURIOUS’ AT PRESS OVER CHISM INCIDENT; FIRES WARDEN and the subhead CALLS OUTSIDE JOURNALISTS ‘MEDDLERS’; THREATENS TO ‘THROW THE SWITCH MYSELF.’ The Democrat gave a full report of the scene at the aborted execution, including the condemned man’s moving appeal, not for himself but for his fellow convict, “less than of age” Ernest Bodenhammer, and his accusation that Bodenhammer’s victim, the guard McChristian, had murdered numerous inmates. The reporter, to Viridis’ embarrassment, quoted the condemned man’s intended-to-be-last words, “Tell her that I and the trees will love her forevermore,” and identified “her” as “Little Rock reporter-illustrator Viridis Monday, 26, daughter of banker Cyril J. Monday,” but was not able to identify the reference to trees.
Tom Fletcher invited