The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [217]
“You’re not?” he will say. “I was tole that you was the only one that knows.”
I will gesture vaguely northward. “I jist think it’s somewheres up yonder.”
He will correct my gesture, pointing properly eastward. “Naw, it’s over yonderways, up that mountain.”
“Could you show me?” I will ask.
“Well, I don’t want to go right up to the cave with ye, but I could lead ye part of the ways.”
“As far as where Sull Jerram was shot?” I will ask.
“Shore, I could take ye that—” Abruptly he will stop and change what he’s saying to: “Everbody knows whar that is, don’t they?”
“Nossir,” I will tell him. “Jist me and whoever it was kilt him.”
Will it matter, in the end, who killed Sewell Jerram? I think that what will matter, what will be of any interest to anybody, will be not so much the identity of the culprit as, rather, the motive. The reason that Sull Jerram was shot and killed was not because he was about to molest Viridis, not because he had raped and abused Dorinda Whitter, not because he had sent an innocent man to prison, but because he alone knew how much Lincoln Villines had to do with the bootlegging operation that had started the whole thing.
Arkansas has had a number of governors who were less than brilliant, less than capable, less than gubernatorial. George Washington Hays himself, despite his corruption, was not without intelligence, was a man who made many mistakes but was at least smart enough to realize when he had made a mistake. In this story Governor Hays will not last much longer, not as governor. In November he will announce that he will not seek reelection. He is intelligent enough to know that he would probably be defeated if he did seek it. Lincoln Villines was not intelligent enough to realize that he could never have been elected to the office even if he had not been stupid enough to get involved in a bootlegging operation.
A professor of political economy at the University of Arkansas, Charles Hillman Brough (the name rhymes with “tough”), will decide to campaign for the 1916 Democratic nomination for governor, opposing not just Hays, if he chooses to run again, but Hays’s entire machine, especially the Jeff Davis faction of the machine, which will appear so eager to hand the nomination to hillbilly Lincoln Villines…until suddenly Villines will not only be revealed to have a shady past but also be suspected of, and then indicted for, murdering a fellow judge, Sewell Jerram, who had threatened to expose that shady past.
The scandal will shake the Democratic Party but not to the extent of preventing its nominee, Brough, from swamping the Republican and Socialist nominees in the general election, by almost a hundred thousand votes.
As one of his last acts in office, as the very last of a long string of sometimes questionable pardons, Governor Hays will grant a pardon to Lincoln Villines, then under a relatively light sentence of ten years, a Newton County jury having convicted him not of murder, reasoning that it isn’t murder to do away with a bad man, but of “voluntary manslaughter,” as the foreman attempted to classify it.
Governor Hays in retirement will keep a law office in Little Rock and will publish a number of articles in national publications, arguing his continued advocacy of capital punishment as the only alternative to mob violence. During Prohibition and the Jazz Age he will remain a staunch supporter of Alfred Smith as the Democrats’ candidate for president, because, he will point out, “It was the Republican Party that tried to force the social equality of the Negro upon the Aryan people of the South.” But Hays will not live to see Smith win Arkansas while losing most of the South and the election. Hays will die as another advocate of Aryan supremacy, an Austrian named Schicklgruber, is rising to power in Germany.
Governor Brough, an erudite and persuasive man bent upon prison reform and better roads and education, will as one of his first acts of office consider extending a pardon to Nail Chism, unconditional except