The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [158]
Then came the really tricky part, as they say. Ernest and Nail had to move apart, straddling the wall, so that there would be enough space between them to pull up the ladder and turn it and lower it to the outside of the wall. Without exchanging a word, they gingerly performed this maneuver, Ernest lifting the bottom of the ladder over his head and pointing it toward the outside, while Nail held the top rung and the rope.
In his months of thinking about the escape, Nail had often wondered if the ground outside the wall, on the east side, would be lower than inside. He had no way of knowing. It stood to reason that the levels would be the same, that the wall stood on firm, flat ground. But from his one trip with Dempsey to the warden’s house, Nail had observed how sharply the land on that side, the north side, sloped downward away from the wall, and he was prepared to find that the slope was similar on the east side. But in this darkness they could not see the ground down there beyond the wall.
With Ernest steadying the ladder and letting go of it rung by rung, Nail lowered it until he was holding the end of the rope. The ladder still twisted and swayed. Nail’s forehead broke out in sweat. “Goddamn,” he said, just loud enough for Ernest to hear him. “I caint touch ground. The ladder won’t reach.”
“Must be a long way down there,” Ernest said in awe.
Could there be, Nail wondered, some kind of dry moat running around that end of the wall? The eight-foot rope was attached to a ladder of about thirty feet. So was it over forty feet down to the ground? He kicked out behind him with his legs until he lay on his stomach flat across the ridge of the wall. “Hold me down,” he told Ernest, and he leaned and stretched as far down the outside of the wall as he could, with the rope in his fist…until finally it seemed he could feel, through the rope, that the shoes of the ladder had touched ground. He tugged the rope end against the wall, but the contact he’d made with the shoes seemed to vanish. He could only hope the shoes would hit ground and the side rails would lean the right way against the wall when he let go of the rope. He let go and waited.
Then, after a time, they heard the ladder crash to the ground.
“YOU HEAR THAT?!?” a voice in the tower called, and another voice answered, “THERE’S SOMEBODY OUT THERE!” and from a third tower another voice tried to substitute for the dead alarm bell by yelling at top volume, “JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK!” The lights in the barracks, on the same circuit as the projector, came on, and Nail knew the movie was aborted.
“Lord God!” said Ernest. “What do we do now?”
“We shore caint jump fer it!” Nail said. “We’d break our fool necks.”
“We gonna jist sit here till they come and git us down?”
Nail pointed. “See that?” Down toward one of the guard towers, about five feet out from the wall, there was the silhouette of a smooth cypress pole of the electrical system, carrying power to and from the engine room. It occurred to Nail that this pole, intended to help bring in the current that would have extinguished his life and Ernest’s, now offered the only hope of saving them. “Jist watch me,” Nail told Ernest, “and see if you caint do what I do.” Nail raised himself and stood up on the wall, balancing carefully, trying to feel the slightest warning in the delicate balance mechanisms within his ears as he placed one foot in front of the other until he was as close to the power pole as he could reach; he bent at his knees as if about to squat, then sprang up and out toward the cypress pole, slamming his body against it painfully but throwing his arms around it, and then his legs. Slowly he slid down the pole until his feet touched ground.
He wanted to kneel and kiss the ground, the free earth of the outside world, but he stood and watched Ernest teetering along the top of the wall toward the same leaping-spot. Ernest swayed and nearly toppled