The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [191]
“What I been tellin ye the last ten minutes, dangdurn it. Don’t tell me yore name if ye don’t wanter. I don’t keer.”
“My name is Nail,” Nail said.
“Huh? Is that a fack now? I thought ye was funnin me.” The man studied him more closely. “You got any kinfolks hereabouts?”
“Not as I know of, but you never kin tell, if it’s got that name. It’s a ole fambly name.”
“Yo’re the sorriest-lookin feller ever I seed,” the man said. “What happened to yore haid?”
It struck Nail that his shaved head and his face smeared with raspberry juice made him look either injured or comical, or both. His faded and torn chambray shirt and trousers would not have given him away as a convict; and now he was glad that being in the death hole had not required him to wear stripes like the other convicts. “I had the mange,” he said, rubbing his head. And then, running his hand down his cheek: “And this aint nothin but berry stain.”
Gesturing with the gun barrel toward the chimney, the man asked, “You got a far burnin in thar?”
Nail nodded and asked, “This place don’t belong to nobody, does it?”
“Belongs to me,” the man said. “You wanter buy it?”
“Naw, I’m jist a-passin through,” Nail said. “I jist aimed to stay a night or two.”
“Aint no bed in thar, I guess ye noticed,” the man said. “But you jist come over to my place. Aint far from yere.”
“I don’t want to trouble ye,” Nail said.
“No trouble, and I got a spare bed fer comp’ny. Come on.”
So Nail went with the man, first banking the coals in his fireplace and retrieving his shoes, which were pretty much dried by now. As Nail put them on, with difficulty using just one hand, and unable to tie the laces, the man observed, “Swum the river, did ye? What happened to yore good hand?”
“I reckon I must’ve th’owed my shoulder out of joint,” Nail said.
That night, in the man’s cabin, which wasn’t any larger than the abandoned cabin Nail had taken up residence in, but was in reasonably good condition, the man urged a tin cup full of some strong, fiery whiskey upon Nail, who, being the equal of any of his forebears as a connoisseur of corn liquor, coughed and gagged and declined a second helping, but the man said, “You’d best swaller all of that stuff ye kin hold, or it’ll kill ye when I fix yore arm.”
“You’ve fixed arms before?” Nail asked apprehensively.
“A time or two,” the man said. “Drink up.” Nail swallowed as much of the bad booze as he could force down his throat; his stomach was feeling giddier than his head. The man said, “Let’s take off that shirt,” then unbuttoned and removed it from him, as a valet might have done. Then he asked, “You ready? Better take one more big swaller.”
Nail drained his tin cup, with deliberate speed that left both his head and his stomach lightened, while the man probed and poked Nail’s upper arm and shoulder, and then, quicker than Nail could think, threw a strange, complicated two-arm lock around his upper body and lunged and pulled and jerked.
Nail screamed. The pitch and volume of his agonized bellow would have surprised him had he not momentarily blacked out. When he had resumed awareness and could still feel the searing torture in his shoulder joint, he became aware of the man’s words: “Jesus! I reckon they could hear ye all the way back at the stir.”
Nail groaned and sighed at length, and then asked, “The where?”
“The big house,” the man said. “Whar ye came from. The Walls.”
Nail eyed the man, at the same instant discovering that he could again move his right arm, although painfully. “How’d ye know?” he asked.
The man held up Nail’s shirt. “Use to wear one myself.”
“You break out too?”
The man nodded. “But before they even finished buildin her.”
Nail spent that night, and three more nights, with the man, who never told him his name. Nail knew that the only man who had ever successfully escaped The Walls and was still at large was named McCabe, so he assumed