The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [133]
“Did anyone ever tell you that you look just like Charlie Chaplin?” she asked him.
“Who?” he asked, but she did not repeat herself. She realized he had never been to the movies.
In his room she offered to prepare some supper for him, but he said he wasn’t hungry, he’d just like another little drink if she had any left, and if she didn’t he had a pint somewhere around here. She told him that if he drank any more, he wouldn’t be able to walk to the penitentiary, even though it was only a short distance down the road. He would have to eat something. In his cupboard she found a loaf of bread and a bologna sausage, which she sliced, and made three sandwiches, two for him, one for herself. She considered making coffee but then decided she didn’t want him any more sober than he was now.
Making conversation to keep him paying attention, she asked, “How much do they pay you for a job?”
“Fiff dahs,” he said.
“Only five?” she said.
“Fiffy,” he said. “Fiffy dahs.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s a lot. Tonight you’ll make a hundred dollars.”
“Doanwannit,” he insisted. “Doanwannit.”
She had to use the bathroom. When she returned, he was sitting on the edge of his bed, tilting up a pint bottle of his own whiskey and letting it run down his throat. “Hey!” she said, and moved to stop him. “You’ve had enough of that, now. You won’t be able to walk to work.”
“Doanwanna. Doanwanna.” He groaned these sounds, then he fell over on the bed and passed out. She shook him, and shook him harder, but could not rouse him. She glanced at the clock on the table. It was almost five. Two hours to sundown. Probably, the executioner was expected to be on the job half an hour before. She made a pot of coffee but couldn’t get him to wake up and drink it. She drank some herself.
She sat on the edge of the bed beside his flopped-out body, thinking. In all truth, in all veritas, Viridis Monday was no closer to a decision than when she had walked out of the governor’s office. She sat on the bed of Irvin Bobo until she had determined he probably would sleep a long time. Then she knew what she had to do.
On
He protested when they tried to shave him again. Hell, it had only been ten days since they’d shaved him last, and he’d hardly had time to regrow anything but peach fuzz. He didn’t mind so much being made bald as a doorknob for the third time, but he hated the goddamn trusty-barber, who couldn’t hold his hand steady enough to keep from slashing his scalp. The barber had done a bad job on Ernest, Nail could tell just by listening. Ernest hadn’t liked it at all. The kid wasn’t the least bit vain about his mop of red hair, and he had surprised Nail with his ideas about facing death calmly because we all have to go sooner or later, but he yelled at Fat Gill, “I been a-cuttin my own hair since I was five year old, and aint nobody else never touched it! Give me that there razor, and I’ll do it myself!” Fat Gill had guffawed at the thought that they’d be dumb enough to let the boy get hold of the razor. Nail, listening, had determined that Fat Gill and Short Leg were both required to hold Ernest down while the barber shaved him. They wouldn’t have to hold Ernest when they put him in Old Sparky…not unless they did Nail first and made Ernest watch, and if they did that, Ernest might easily get mad or scared and start fighting. Nobody would tell them which one was going first. Maybe they’d flip a coin at the last minute. Nail hoped that he could go last, simply because he had enough experience to bear watching Ernest get it, in a way that wouldn’t be so the other way around. But try explaining this to anybody. Of course there was always a chance that Viridis had got all of those newspapermen to come back again, but Nail doubted it. He had spent a good bit of time trying to imagine how Viridis might save him this time, but he hadn’t been able to come up with a single blessèd notion, although he wouldn’t put