The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [153]
“I’m takin Fletcher,” he declared. He smiled. “And Ernest too, of course.”
Before their lips met again in parting, he said, in a very gentle voice, as if he were still conspiring in his escape, “I love you, Viridis, and I’ll see you soon in the great free world of trees.”
“I love you, Nail, and I can hardly wait,” she said.
Later, back in their cells after Ernest had been up and delivered his whole output of artwork to Viridis, Nail heard Ernest remark as if to the walls, “Yes, it might be clear Sunday.”
“Who cares?” said Sam Bell.
“Going to a ballgame maybe?” asked Joe Strong.
“Naw, he’s goin on a picnic,” said Clarence Dewein.
“Don’t save none of them cookies for it,” Nail suggested. “Share a few with the other boys.”
“You’uns want chonklit, pecan, or oatmeal?” Ernest offered.
On the Tuesday ahead of that special Saturday, it was announced that the movie this week would be a lively comedy photoplay on loan from a major downtown theater, The Gem, and would have six whole reels. It was called Tillie’s Punctured Romance, and Tillie would be played by Marie Dressler, while the male lead was acted by the celebrated Charlie Chaplin, who everybody was dying to see. Nail himself was sorry that he couldn’t watch the movie, because he wanted to see if it was true, as Viridis had told him, that Charlie Chaplin looked just like ole Bobo…or like Viridis herself that one time she had changed herself. Nail did a little bit of calculating and decided he couldn’t just leave the circuits shorted while he went over the wall. It wouldn’t be fair to the inmates, who by that time would be spellbound by the movie. He would have to figure out some way to turn the projector back on as his last act before taking off.
The next morning he asked Dempsey, “Does this here circuit draw from the same box the arc lamps are on?”
“No, that’s on the free line down to the transformer,” Dempsey pointed out, and chided him: “You ought to know that.”
“Jist makin sure,” Nail said.
Warden Yeager called him in once more, and once more the warden asked, friendly-like, “Is there anything more we can do for you to make you happy?”
“Nossir,” Nail said, “I reckon I’m pretty happy.”
The warden changed his tone, dropping the friendliness. “You aint gonna be much longer. I got bad news hee hee. Matter of fact, I got lots of real bad news. One, we got to take you out of that powerhouse and out of your tomato patch. It’s against the rules for a condemned man to do any work, you know that, and we been letting you do it just on account of Reverend Tomme. They fired him. He was a nice fellow, and I’m kind of sorry to see him go, but he was really meddling a lot, and he don’t know very much about how to run a pen. If you want to say good-bye to him, we gave him permission to make one last visit to the pen tomorrow. He said he wanted to see you especially, because he knows you’re gonna die. That’s the real bad news. There’s three more men coming in this week to wait for the chair, and that’s just too many. The governor has been getting a lot of trouble from everybody because of all the pardons and delays and commutations he’s been throwing around like Santa Claus. So the word is out: we got to make room in the death hole. You and Bodenhammer and Sam Bell are getting transferred hee hee, to hell hee hee, in the chair this Saturday at sundown.”
Nail was not too certain he had heard the warden correctly. What with all of those hee-hee’s mixed up in there, it was kind of difficult to be absolutely certain that Travis Don Yeager had just announced that there would be a triple execution this Saturday, approximately two hours before Nail intended to go over the wall. “Sir?” Nail said, feeling bewildered. “What did you say?”
“You heard me,” Yeager