The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [130]
Viridis felt her eyes beginning to get wet. While she could still see clearly through them, she looked at the paintings hanging on the walls of the governor’s office, portraits of his predecessors, some of the state’s more enlightened governors, such as Donaghey and Robinson and even the demagogue Jeff Davis. Her glance fell upon one portrait she recognized because of the clear family resemblance: Jacob Ingledew of Stay More. None of the portraits was a skillful painting. Each of them, by a different artist, was sloppy in brushstroke, muddy in color, unperceptive in interpretation of character. Her hand idly swept them. “Just to think,” she said, “someday Ernest Bodenhammer might have been the very artist to do your portrait to hang on that wall, and he would have made you look much better than all of them.”
His eyes, following her hand, gazed upon the clumsy likenesses of his precursors and seemed to reflect a mingling of veneration for their subjects’ high position in history and a distaste for their second-rate execution by the semiskilled portraitists. He studied the portraits for a while, even swiveling his chair around so he could contemplate them. Was he trying to imagine his own image up there someday? At length he swiveled his chair back to face her, leaned across his desk with his arms upon it, and said to her, “You really love Ernest Bodenhammer, don’t you?”
She would not deny it. “I really love Ernest Bodenhammer.”
“And you really love Nail Chism, don’t you?”
As if intoning a litany, she said, “I really love Nail Chism.”
The governor stood up. Respectfully or politely she stood too, wondering if he was not going to say anything further. But he did: “Miss Monday, I’d like for you to put yourself in my place. No, I’m going to do it for you: I’m going to put you in my place. As of this moment, I hereby authorize you, by executive order, to determine which one of the two men shall live, Nail Chism or Ernest Bodenhammer. Decide.”
It was almost as if he had struck her, and it took her a moment to recover from the blow. Her first reaction was to say, “You can’t be serious.”
“Oh, but I am. I am dead serious. Aren’t you already beginning to feel the awesome responsibility that bears down on me? I am shifting that burden to you. You make that choice. The State decrees that both of them must die. There is no way on this earth that you, or I, or anybody, can save both of them. The State—call it public opinion if you will—would not allow it. But you may save one of them; just decide which one.”
“You are simply trying to make a point,” she declared. “You wouldn’t let me do that, any more than you would let me enter Nail’s cell and stay with him.”
“I give you my solemn word of honor, Miss Monday. The choice is yours.”
“It isn’t fair!” she cried out.
“No, it certainly isn’t!” he cried back at her. “But people ask me to make that kind of decision every day of my life! It’s grossly unfair!”
For a moment she did understand, and she did feel some sympathy for the governor. It was a terrifying dilemma. But now, if he was playing a game with her to prove his point, could she meet the challenge? She thought of Solomon sitting in judgment on the two prostitutes arguing over a baby, and Solomon’s determining the true mother by proposing to slice the baby in two. Could she find a Solomonic solution to this problem?
“Well?” the governor said at length, after waiting for her response. “Give me your decision, and I’ll have Martha come in here and draw up the executive order commuting the death sentence to life imprisonment for the man of your choice.”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t do it. Not right now. I would have to think about it.”
“They don’t give me time to think,” the governor protested. “Oftentimes I have to make a judgment right on the spot.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Don’t you realize I would have to live with the decision all the rest of my life?”
“And don’t you, my dear,