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By Root 2099 0

as if she were a voyeur standing right beside the bed where the naked couple clenched in a tangle of arms, legs, elbows, knees, at the center of which their genitals seemed to be trying to devour each other. The man was Nail. There was no mistake, although his face was in profile. Nail, with a full head of handsome blond hair disheveled and matted by the sweat from his exertions. The woman…she certainly wasn’t Dorinda Whitter, or anyone else Viridis could recognize, just a typical country girl, an earth goddess, very pretty and very shapely and very passionate. Had Ernest simply “borrowed” Nail for an imagined scene? Or had he re-created an actual event that Nail had described and narrated to him? Viridis was surprised at how grudging she felt; she turned three shades of green, jealous of whoever the lucky girl had been. And this answered, perhaps, her longstanding question, which she had vaguely worded to Nail’s mother: “Did Nail ever have a girlfriend?” But as she stared in awe at Ernest’s drawing, trying to forget the subject long enough to fully appreciate the draughtsmanship, she realized that it had the unexpected power to arouse her sexually. She was burning.

Not the Arkansas Gazette but its rival, the Arkansas Democrat, on pages 8 and 9 of the issue of Monday, April 26, 1915, carried Viridis’ story about Ernest Bodenhammer, with two illustrations: a fuzzy photograph of the boy taken about two years before, and a fair reproduction of his masterpiece, “Old Sparky.” This was the first picture of the electric chair that had ever appeared in the pages of the Democrat, whose readership has always been more plebeian and democratic than that of the Gazette. A younger newspaper with an inferiority complex (it was founded at the time of the Mexican War in 1846, whereas the Gazette has been “the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi” since 1819), the Democrat has occasionally resorted to sensationalism, if not outright yellow journalism, in its circulation rivalry, and Tom Fletcher himself suggested that Viridis try the piece on the Democrat, because he and his paper felt that the “Chism case” had already been given maximum exposure and readers were not interested in yet another story of “wrongful electrocution.” In Europe, Germany was making war on Holland and invading Baltic Russia and preparing its submarines to torpedo the Lusitania (the ship Viridis had taken abroad), and the Gazette’s readers were beginning to turn their attention away from small local events to the international crisis and the growing issue of America’s nonintervention, which most Gazette readers supported. Letters to the editor were preponderantly concerned with the war in Europe, and a total of only three letters had been received about the Chism case, two of them demanding to know why the governor didn’t go ahead and pull the switch himself, “like he said he would.”

Tom Fletcher said to her, “Very, this Bodenhammer piece is a serious mistake. It will only divert the public’s attention from the Chism case.”

Viridis’ story in the Democrat, which an editor titled GIFTED YOUNG ARTIST MUST GO TO MEET HIS NIGHTMARE, was the only publicity that Ernest Bodenhammer ever received. She was disappointed that the Democrat showed only one of Ernest’s drawings, but, as an editor candidly admitted to her, the typical Democrat reader “didn’t know Rembrandt from Rumpelstiltskin.” Viridis paid to have matted and framed behind glass a dozen of Ernest’s best drawings (omitting of course that one), and tried to find a good place to show them concurrently with the appearance of her Democrat article, but the only place she could hang them was the Little Rock Public Library. She had photoengravings printed of those twelve drawings and mailed them out to her friends at Associated Press, as well as to the men who had come to Nail’s thwarted execution and her party. She sent a special note along with the mailing to the Houston Chronicle man who had proposed to her. But if his newspaper, or any other newspaper in America, used her Bodenhammer story, she never received clippings