The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [140]
Nail smiled. “All I want to do, Reverend, is raise my sheep and watch after ’em as best I know how.”
“That’s just what our friend Jesus once said,” Lee Tomme observed. “‘I am the good shepherd,’ he said; ‘the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.’ You’ve come close three times to giving your life, but Jesus, or God the Mother if you think that way, has saved you from death because He or She, or both of them as One, has been put to death and knows what it’s like and doesn’t want you to have it, not just yet.”
“That’s fine spoke, Reverend,” Nail said.
“Will you call me Lee?” he asked. “Just Lee. And I’ll call you Nail? Good. We have much work to do.”
“I aint had any work to do,” Nail observed. “That’s been my main problem. The whole time I’ve been in this prison, they’ve never given me a chance to do a lick of work.”
Lee shook his head in sympathy. “It’s an idiotic law that says a man condemned to die cannot be made to work, or even allowed to work. But that’s their law, and I can only try to change it. Nail, would you tell me anything else you don’t like about this place?”
Nail laughed. “Have you got all day?”
“I’ve got all day,” Lee said, “and all night too, if need be.”
The Reverend Mr. Lee Tomme did not spend the entire day and night with Nail Chism, but he stayed past suppertime and insisted on eating supper with Nail, the same cornbread and cowpeas. A couple of days later there was a front-page article in the Gazette, NEW PRISON CHAPLAIN BLASTS CONDITIONS.
“The food is not fit to eat, the living conditions are unhealthy beyond belief, and the unprovoked punishment is a hideous infliction of unspeakable pain,” the Reverend Mr. Tomme was quoted as saying. “It is the same story at Tucker, the white men’s prison farm, and at Cummins, the farm for black men and women. The whole prison system in the state of Arkansas is begging for change, and we are going to change it, even if we have to abolish the machine politician!
“Our prison system is at least fifty years behind the national standard, which is bad enough. The penitentiary and the farms are not self-sustaining, when they easily could be. The only mode of punishment known to the keepers, for any violation, real or imagined, of the rules, real or imagined, is the strap. And a terrible strap it is, which beggars description, although I intend to describe it if it is not immediately abolished.
“There is no self-respecting poor dirt farmer in the state of Arkansas who would permit his animals to dwell in the filth and the horror that surround these human beings, or who would flay them as these men are flayed. There are fewer deaths from natural causes than from preventable disease and from this corporal punishment which is in fact an illegal form of capital punishment.
“Where does the blame lie? The guards are only doing what they think is expected of them. The new superintendent, Warden Yeager, is an experienced penal administrator who is open to change, experiment, and improvement. The governor…ladies and gentlemen, I would not have the freedom to make these criticisms if the governor had not appointed me pastor to the poor oppressed captives.
“Who, then, is to blame? You are. And I am. Any one of us who learns of the brutal injustices of this system and does not act to stop them is in collusion with them! Let us put a stop to them now.”
The very next day, Fat Gill escorted Nail upstairs into the engine room of the powerhouse and interrupted a big fellow almost as tall as Nail but thicker-muscled, who looked as if he could eat Fat Gill for breakfast and want a second helping. “Here he is,” said Fat Gill.
“Take the cuffs off,” the man said.
“But he’s dangerous,” Fat Gill