The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [20]
Before I was separated from my parents at the courthouse, my father squeezed my arm very hard and said, “Gal, don’t you go and bring no embarrassment upon us. You do what the sheriff tole ye to do, hear me?”
I knew I would be punished for it (and I was, later), but I disobeyed my father and the sheriff: I refused to tell the court that Nail Chism was the man I had seen looking at our playhouse. Judge Villines himself started in to asking me questions, helping out the prosecutor, but I swore the man I saw looking at our playhouse was not Nail Chism.
Fat lot of good it did. Dorinda Whitter sat there in her purewhite Sears, Roebuck lawn dress and told her story again as if she had been rehearsing it every spare minute of July, with somebody helping her rehearse; as if she had been practicing how to cry, and she did a real good job of crying. There was a lot of crying in the audience when she cried. And a lot of gasping. And more than one of the jurors had spittle dribbling down his chin. There were just twelve men this time, and none of them were sleeping or drunk, at least not while testimony was given and the summations were made, all in one afternoon. Juries in those days were never sequestered overnight, and a rumor went around that Sull J. held a quiet little party that night at his house, two blocks from the courthouse, with plenty of Chism’s Dew, ironically, I thought, and that certain of the jurymen had been present and had imbibed freely and had made up their minds then and there before they returned the next morning and required only forty-five minutes of deliberation to find Nail Chism guilty.
When Nail was asked by Judge Villines if he had anything to say before sentence was passed upon him, he said, “I jist want to ask one question: is there ary man, woman, or child in this here courtroom who honestly believes I raped that girl? If so, stand up and look me in the eye.”
For a full minute not one person stood, except Nail, who was already standing, towering over every man. Then, finally, the prosecutor and Sull Jerram nodded at each other and seemed to agree to rise up together, and those two stood. Then the foreman of the jury stood up. Three other jurymen rose, that’s all. After a few moments Judge Villines himself stood.
Maybe she was too dumb, but Dorinda herself never did think to stand up.
Judge Villines, still standing, along with those half-dozen others, said, “Nail Chism, it is the sentence of this yere court that you be committed to the custody of the Arkansas State Penitentiary in Little Rock and that there you be put to death according to law. May Gawd have mercy on yore soul.”
On the storeporch at Ingledew’s, in the days following, the men talked of the drought, and that ruckus in Europe, and not so much the guilt or innocence of Nail Chism as the exceptional speed of the trial (“Like them courthouse critters had made up their minds in advance,” one said) and the exceptional severity of the sentence. Nobody from Newton County had ever gone to the electric chair. It was an awesome fate, and not fully understood, since there was no electricity in Newton County—Jasper itself was still several years away from the first primitive attempts at electrification. The closest anybody could conceive of a lesson to explain it was getting lightningstruck, like old Haskins Duckworth, who couldn’t move one side of his face and was bald on that one side but was still alive, they thought. The only time anybody had been convicted of rape, not in my lifetime but back in the last century, they’d simply cut off his testicles and let him choose whether to sing soprano or stop going to church, and he chose the latter.
August is an awful month in the best of years, but that August the trees stopped