The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [149]
“Do you want me to let you know if I can figure out something?” Lee asked in a whisper. “Or would that be conspiracy?”
“Yeah, I reckon it would, I reckon you better let me figger it out by myself.”
“Okay. Shall we change the subject, and speak louder? Do you know, when I worked in the Colorado prisons, instead of beating a man they would punish him by taking away his privilege of seeing the weekly motion picture.”
Nail smiled. “That’s nice. I aint never seen a motion picture.”
“I thought as much. My next improvement to this facility—possibly my last improvement—will be to have movies shown, each Saturday night, and to suggest that violators of prison rules be punished not by the strap but by being forbidden to attend the picture show.”
“The picture shows will be done at night?” Nail asked.
“Of course. The barracks will have to be dark.”
“And somebody who knows something about electricity will have to help ’em run the projector?”
“You catch on very quickly, Brother Chism, but shall we change the subject?”
“Yeah. Tell me what it’s like in Colorado. Do they raise a lot of sheep out there?”
A general prison announcement was made that the following Saturday at sundown there would be a performance of The Absentee, a great allegorical photoplay. The movie was projected onto four bedsheets sewn together on a wall of the barracks, from three reels on an old Edison donated by The Crystal, a Little Rock theater that was updating its equipment. It was the greatest event since Christmas. Nobody from the death hole was allowed to attend, but midway through the motion picture all of the power went out, and the old Edison began to smoke, and Fat Gill was sent down to get Nail and see if he could find out what was wrong. Nail was taken up to the engine room, without handcuffs, and guarded as he checked the generator and the fuses and the circuits. After replacing one of the fuses that had blown, he was taken into the barracks to check the projector. Nail found a wire loose in the Edison and twisted it back onto its contact, but not so tight that it wouldn’t come off and short again before long. Then, because of the service he had performed, he was permitted to watch the rest of the picture show, in handcuffs. The show was difficult. As near as he could figure, it was about some character named Might, who took over a factory and lowered the wages of the workers, pocketing the difference for the betterment of his daughters, named Extravagance and Vanity. It was real strange, watching the people actually run around and do things, and move their mouths like they were talking, only their words would appear in letters when the screen went dark, and their words didn’t mean very much. The workers went on strike, led by a man named Evil, but Evil got a heart attack and the strike fizzled out, and in the end the owner of the factory, Power, came home and discovered what a mess Might had made, and had him arrested.
Although the plot was confusing and the names of people ridiculous, the movie held the audience spellbound, and at the end the men applauded and stomped their feet and hollered and demanded another showing. Warden Yeager himself, who had enjoyed the movie along with his prisoners, got up and made a little speech and told them that if they all behaved themselves there would be another movie the following Saturday night. Almost immediately Nail could detect the men beginning to behave themselves.
Back in his cell, Nail reported to his fellow death-holers on the movie. None of them had seen a picture show before either, and Dewey and Joe said it sounded like one of their nightmares, while Ernest was somewhat apprehensive that motion pictures could make art obsolete, while Sam Bell said it sounded very interesting and tempting but he would probably see heaven or hell, one, before he saw a motion picture. But all of them, Nail knew, wished they had seen the movie and could be allowed to behave themselves too.
Nail spent a lot of time thinking about the way he had fixed the Edison projector