The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [136]
Jimmie Mac returned and said it was time for them to leave their cells. “Why, howdy, Nail,” Ernest said at the sight of naked Nail standing handcuffed outside his door. “I aint seen you in a coon’s age. Do I look as bad as you do?” Yes, it had been all of a month since they’d last laid eyes on each other, although they had talked so much they hardly had anything left to say, and yes, Ernest looked pretty awful with his red hair all gone except around his pecker. Now it was Ernest who began to protest to the guards, “Hey! Aint you gonna give us our clothes back? We caint go up thar nekkid as the day we was born! What if they’s a lady present?”
“They aint no lady present,” Fat Gill assured them. Nail sighed with relief, and soon saw what he meant: among the few witnesses there was no woman, no Viridis, not yet anyhow, and he hoped she would never come. Even if she did, they wouldn’t let her into the room as long as he and Ernest had their peckers a-hanging down. There wasn’t no governor neither. Just five strangers…well, one of them he had seen before, a newspaperman who’d been here the last time. He was the only one of the five who looked like he cared, and he was raising his eyebrows at the sight of these two convicts stark-naked. The death room was still illuminated only by the light from that one green-shaded bulb up near the ceiling, so it wasn’t as if their genitals were exposed to harsh spotlight. In such darkness Nail didn’t even feel naked.
Warden Yeager explained to the newspaperman, “We aint takin any chances this time hee hee. Were you here when the last warden had a little problem?”
“Yes, I was,” the newspaperman said. “Well, ‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither.’”
“What’s that from?” the warden asked.
Jimmie Mac butted in. “The Bible. Book of Job, one and twenty-one. ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessèd be the name of the Lord.’ And the Good Book goes on, next chapter, ‘Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life.’”
The warden looked at Jimmie Mac uncertainly and asked, “Are you supposed to say a lot?”
“Just the final prayer,” Jimmie Mac informed him, clearly liking the position of telling the new warden what was what.
“I aint been through this before,” the warden declared, as if anybody needed to be told. “Do you say the final prayer now, or do we wait till Bobo gets here?”
The newspaperman spoke up. “We ought to wait till the governor gets here.” He’d hardly said those words when the turnkey opened the guests’ door, and in walked a man who surely was the governor, with another man who looked like he must be the local sheriff, and a third man who must be the governor’s bodyguard.
“Good heavens!” said the man who must be governor, and accosted the warden, demanding, “Why are these men naked?”
“We found that blade, Your Honor hee hee,” Yeager said. “I thought we would, and we stripped ’em and searched ’em to be sure, and Chism had a blade. I found it hee hee.”
“Well, why are they just standing around like that?” the governor asked. He was more nervous than the warden, and looked like he was hunting for a place to relieve himself. “Why don’t you do something?”
“We will, Your Honor,” Yeager said. “We were just waitin for you to get here.”
The governor looked around at the others in the room, squinting in the semidarkness to see how many were there. “If I’m saying there shall be only six witnesses,” the governor said, “then there can be only six witnesses. Some of you men will have to go. Like you, Fletcher. Why don’t you take off?”
The newspaperman laughed. “There has to be at least one of us poor ink-stained devils here, and it’s me,” he said.
The governor and his party evicted three of the other witnesses and took their seats, the governor sitting on the front row. The governor glanced at Nail’s pecker and then at Ernest’s, as if he were comparing them. “Do these men have to keep standing like that?” he asked