The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [141]
“Shit. He won’t hurt me. Take the cuffs off and get out of here.” Fat Gill obeyed. As soon as the guard was gone, the big fellow offered Nail a cigarette, and when Nail declined, he offered him a swig from a pint bottle, which Nail knew he could not successfully decline, so he made no attempt. While he was wiping his mouth with one hand, the big man grabbed his other hand and shook it, and said, “I’m Guy Dempsey, and one of these days I’m gonna burn your ass, but meanwhile you’re gonna be my helper. You know anything about electricity?”
Nail shook his head. “The closest I come to learnin anything was when the feller who had your job let his hand slip and gave me a little charge before I was supposed to get the full dose.”
“Okay, here’s where we start,” Dempsey said. “Pay close attention, and they might even name something after you. They named the volt after a guy named Count Volta, they named the watt after James Watt, they named the ohm after a German physicist, and they named the ampere after André Ampère. They might decide to call the dose it takes to electrocute a man a chism. Unless you invent something better. Pay attention.”
Beginning that day, and continuing every day afterward, G.H. Dempsey taught Nail Chism everything he knew about electrostatics, electrodynamics, and electromagnetics. At the end of that first day, Dempsey gave him a copy of Rowland’s Applied Electricity for Practical Men and told him to memorize it. It wasn’t nearly as thick as Dr. Hood, but it was twice as difficult. Thinking of Dr. Hood, Nail wondered if Viridis had ever noticed the “message,” such as it was, that he had tried to smuggle out to her in Dr. Hood, wherein, on the page defining mustard oil, he had used his own blood to underline the definition. It wasn’t fair of him, he realized, to have expected her to figure out what that meant. Even if she saw the smear of blood and read the definition, she wouldn’t know that he was asking her to smuggle some mustard oil in to him.
He didn’t have to wait for the morning light to read the Rowland book. Now he could read anytime because Dempsey had wired and illuminated the dungeon of the death hole, thanks to Warden Yeager, who had also put Ernest to work painting the walls of it. The job took him only a week, but he was allowed outside his cell all day in order to do it. That freedom and employment were a rare novelty to him, so Ernest happily painted while Nail did odd jobs upstairs in the engine room and took in Dempsey’s lectures and demonstrations on electricity. Sometimes Dempsey had Nail come with him to the main building to do a job, or up to the guard towers to work on the new searchlights. Once Dempsey even took him into the warden’s house outside The Walls to repair some wiring, and Nail reflected that he could have gained his freedom if he had overpowered Dempsey, something he didn’t want to try. In the evenings Nail read Rowland while Ernest drew pictures with his new art kit. The ladies of the Arkansas Federation of Women’s Clubs had put together for Ernest a box containing every conceivable type of artist’s pencil, crayon, chalk, and a set of forty-eight colored pastels, including six shades of green: emerald, moss, olive, viridian, terre verte, and Paris; and he had enough paper, he told Nail, to wallpaper his cell, which he just might do if they didn’t electrocute him soon.
Afer a week of this decent treatment, Warden Yeager himself came down into the death hole one Saturday morning and passed inspection on the new paint job, and then said, “Well, gentlemen, can I do anything else for you?”
“I want another one of them steaks,” Ernest said.
“Yeah, and some more chicken’n dumplins,” Nail said.
“Hee hee, hee hee,” Yeager said. “Aint we been feeding y’all a little bit better lately?”
It was true. There wasn’t any steak or dumplings, but the monotonous cornbread and cowpeas had been replaced by an occasional egg at breakfast, a sandwich at dinner, and a square meal at supper: hash or stew sometimes. They really couldn’t complain about that. “We’re happy, I reckon,