The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [146]
He wanted to watch some trees somewhere splashing the sky with their fingers and shaking their dark-green manes.
Since the painting of the death hole was all finished, they had Ernest build four more cells. They gave him the cement and the concrete blocks and the tools and finally brought him four ready-made barred doors, and all by himself Ernest built four more death cells, each of them only four feet wide by seven feet deep, and he painted those too, making a total of six cells for the death hole, and pretty soon three of the new cells were filled: there was Sam Bell, who had been convicted of killing four members of his divorced wife’s family; and, briefly, two black men who had been convicted of killing their bosses, but they hardly stayed long enough for Nail to learn their names before the governor commuted them to life imprisonment and sent them to Cummins in order to make room for Clarence Dewein and Joe Short, two young white men not much older than Ernest, who had killed a storekeeper together, or one of them had done the shooting while the other robbed the man. The population of the death hole was five. There would have been even more than that, according to the Gazette, except for all the publicity about Nail, which had made juries all over the state reluctant to send men to the electric chair, exercising instead their new option for sentences of life imprisonment.
Warden Yeager summoned Nail to his office, had Short Leg unlock the handcuffs, and offered Nail a cigarette, which he declined. “Gettin kind of crowded down there, aint it hee hee?” the warden observed or asked.
“Yessir,” Nail agreed. “I don’t think that hole was meant to hold that many.”
“But we don’t keep you down there. You doin a good job upstairs with Dempsey, I hear hee hee. A good job, he tells me. Learnin a lot.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Are you happy, Chism?” the warden asked. “Is there anything we could do for you?”
Nail thought. “Well, sir,” he said, “you know that empty piece of the Yard on the east side of the powerhouse? Could I put me a mater patch in it?”
“A mater patch?” the warden asked.
“Yeah, and grow…to-maters? It’s a shame to let a piece of land jist go to waste out there in the Yard, that the men don’t walk on or nothin.
“I could grow enough maters on that piece to feed the prison, come August and September, if you could git me the plants.”
“Well, why not?” the warden said. “I’ll get some niggers out there to spade it up for you. You need some fertilizer too. That’s a good idea. How many plants you need?”
“I reckon fifty or so ought to be all it could hold.”
“We’ll sure do it, then, Chism. Would that make you happy?”
“It would help.”
They gave Nail his tomato patch. It was really late in the year to be planting tomatoes, but the plants the warden got were kind of old and leggy anyhow, and Nail planted them deep. While Nail was cultivating them one afternoon, the warden came out there with three other fellows, all of them dressed in suits with straw hats. Nail was wearing a straw hat too, but it wasn’t fancy, and he took it off. One of the men was a black man, and he was dressed the best. The only one Nail recognized was that local sheriff who had arrested Ernest and had come with the governor to his last execution.
“Chism,” the warden said, “these here are some gentlemen would like to talk to you. This is Mr. George Donaghey, who used to be our governor, and this is the Reverend Dr. Alonzo Monk of the AME church, and I believe you’ve met Sheriff Bill Hutton. Now these men are gonna ask you some questions. Governor Hays has appointed them a commission to inspect and investigate the prison, and I want you to tell ’em just what you think, okay?”
The three men of the governor’s commission stood around in Nail’s tomato patch and asked him all kinds of questions