The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [143]
“Hi, Nail,” she said, smiling.
“Howdy, Viridis,” he said.
“Y’all sit down, now,” Bird said, and they sat in their chairs on opposite sides of the table and looked at each other across the wooden board. The couples on either side of them went on talking. Toy’s woman was saying something about a store burning in De Vall’s Bluff, and the black man was asking his woman if the white folks she worked for were treating her proper. They paid no attention to Nail and Viridis.
“How are you?” Viridis asked, rather formally.
“I am real fine, I reckon,” he answered, somewhat formally himself. “And how are you?”
“I am very hopeful,” she said. “Everything is looking up. They’re treating you decently, aren’t they?”
“Compared with the way it was before,” he said, “it is sure decent.”
“You look good,” she said. “You’re putting on some weight.”
He ran his hand over his bare skull. “My head don’t look too good, I guess.”
“Your hair’s starting to grow back,” she observed. “And they’ll never shave it again.” She repeated: “Never.”
“I don’t know how to thank you for what you done to stop that last execution, because I don’t know for sure just what you done, but me and Ernest both are awful glad you did.”
She smiled. She just smiled that real pretty smile of hers, like she wasn’t going to tell him a thing about what she done. “I hear the…thingamajig in the power plant—the dynamo or whatever you call it, that powers the electric chair—was incapacitated,” she said.
“Yeah. Incapacitated.” He liked the sound of that word. “Dempsey, the new guy, that I’m workin for, he says he can’t figure it out. Something’s busted bad in that dynamo, but I might be able to fix it myself.” He laughed. “Wouldn’t that be something? For me to learn enough about electricity to fix the dynamo so they can go ahead and finish fryin me with it?”
She did not laugh. She leaned close toward the barrier and lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “Nail, the dynamo has a Number 12 cartridge fuse that has been removed and is hidden on the top shelf of the broom closet in the engine room. Leave it there.”
Nail nodded his head. And then he nodded it again, and just left it nodding. At length he asked, “How did you know that’s what it was?”
“It’s written on the side of the fuse,” she said.
“I didn’t think Bobo was smart enough to read,” he said.
“Nail,” she said. She just said his name, but the way she said it seemed to mean, Let’s quit pretending we don’t both know what happened.
He kept his voice down. “Where’d you git the fake mustache?”
She giggled. “It wasn’t fake. It was his. I cut it off.”
“How did he like that?”
“He was dead drunk, and he was still dead drunk when I put his clothes back on him and left him. I doubt he ever woke up until the next morning.”
Nail felt his face getting red, and he knew Viridis could notice the blush. He observed, “You must’ve seen me and Ernest without a stitch.”
“A stitch is a stitch,” she said. “It’s all the same to me.” They both laughed so hard that Bird snapped to attention from his half-bored stance. “You do have a nice body,” she went on. Did she enjoy keeping the blush on his face? “How did that Post-Dispatch reporter say it? ‘Chism is a blue-eyed, light-haired, fair-complexioned man of splendid physique despite what harsh incarceration has done to it.’”
The blush stayed. “I never read no story of that kind,” he said.
“I’m keeping a scrapbook for you,” she said.
Trying to change the subject, he said, “There’s something I can’t figure out. How did you get inside The Walls if you didn’t have