The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [155]
“Next week I’m interviewing for the position of chaplain in the Tennessee prisons,” Lee said. He smiled wryly. “I seem to keep moving eastward, in the direction of civilization.”
“I imagine you’ll stir things up over there, too,” Nail observed.
“I hope they won’t need it as much as Arkansas does,” Lee said. “This place really begs for help.”
“It’s too bad Hays wouldn’t keep you,” Nail said. “That governor can’t seem to make up his mind about anything.”
Lee laughed so uproariously that Nail wondered if he had unintentionally made a joke. “You’ve put him in a nutshell. Governor Hays is weak and indecisive. He changes his mind constantly. If only he could reverse himself just once more about executing you this Saturday, but he’s changed his mind so often that now he lets other people change it for him, and the other people, this time, are the judges and the politicians who are raising a fuss about his clemency.”
“I reckon I’m gone, this time,” Nail allowed, and then he asked, “Lee, you believe in heaven, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, certainly,” Lee said. “But not with clouds and pearly gates and golden streets and all that.”
“But with trees?” Nail said. “Are there trees in heaven?”
“A tree,” Lee declared, “has just as much right to go to heaven as a man does.”
Nail decided that Lee Tomme was even a better man than he had already figured him to be. “I don’t have no reason to go to hell,” he declared, “so I imagine come Saturday night I’ll be amongst them trees, and all of us singing.”
“A cappella,” Lee said.
“Pardon me?”
“No harps, no lutes, no mandolins, none of that,” Lee said. “Just the trees singing as the voice of God.”
Nail smiled and narrowed his eyes. “Will God be singin shaller or deep?”
Lee laughed. “Soprano or baritone? Now, that, Brother Chism, is a very knotty theological problem. But let’s observe that in the very best of choirs, when all voices are loud and together, you don’t notice the pitch of any one.”
“I like that, Brother Tomme,” Nail declared. “And maybe what you’re sayin is that God aint a woman after all, nor a man neither, but God is all sexes, of all kinds and pitches.”
“That’s it,” Lee said. “A pitch is a pitch. It’s all the same to us.”
They both broke up with laughter.
“Brother Tomme,” Nail requested, “will you be around Saturday at the goin down of the sun to lead us to the chair? I’d ’preciate it if you could. I might even let you pray for me.”
Lee Tomme abandoned his jovial face for a very sad one, and shook his head. “I promised the warden I’d be out of The Walls by sundown today. I think that for the executions they’re planning to restore my predecessor, what’s-his-name?”
“Jimmie Mac.”
“Yes, I believe Reverend McPhee is returning Saturday.”
“I hate to hear that,” Nail said. He offered his hand, and when Lee took it, he said, “Well, Reverend, I want to wish you good luck and happiness wherever you go. When I see God under those trees, I’ll tell Them to be sure and love you and keep you on this earth for a long, long time.”
For once Lee was at a loss for words, and his eyes got moist. He did not let go of Nail’s hand. Finally he looked down at their hands, which were just holding, not being shaken, and he placed his other hand on top on the two joined hands and said, “Look, this is my last day here at The Walls. But I think there is one thing more I could do. Yes, before I’m gone for good, I think I could persuade the Little Rock theater people to tell Warden Yeager that due to previous commitments they will have to move up the loan of Tillie’s Punctured Romance from Saturday night to Friday night. How would that do?”
On
And behold, that old Edison shorted out right in the middle of the picture show. From his cell Nail could hear the three hundred men over in the barracks hollering, whistling, clapping, and stomping for several minutes before the lights came on in the death hole, and Fat Gill came down and said, “Okay, Chism, there’s one more little job for you