The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [45]
“The first thing I’m going to do,” Miss Monday declared, “is find out the status of your reprieve. If Governor Hays did it himself, on his own, it’s probably got some political motive and is very temporary. If the Supreme Court made him do it, it might be permanent.” She stood up and stuck her notepad into the pocket of her coat, then pulled the coat tighter around herself. The sun had gone down; the room was very cold now. But Nail, despite the thinness of his cotton jacket, did not suffer the cold. The kindness of this lady warmed him.
He stood up too. “Lady—” he began, but decided that wasn’t polite enough. “Miss Monday, why are you doing this for me?”
Again that pretty smile. “I don’t know what song the trees sang,” she said. “But somehow it told me that the trees would be very sad if you were killed for something you didn’t do.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I thank you kindly.” And he reached out his handcuffs and shook hands with her.
“I said no con-tack, dammit!” Fat Gabe hollered, and moved closer.
They separated their hands. “I’d like to meet the trees,” she said, with one last of those smiles.
“This time of year,” he observed, “they’re as bare as bare can be.”
Off
Fat Gabe and Short Leg beat him up. He shouldn’t have talked back to them. They took him from the death room downstairs to his cell, that dark, dank, cold, tomb-like little space that had been his home for months, since the day in August they’d brought him to The Walls. The cell was in a sort of basement of the electric light and power building that held not just Old Sparky’s room but the transformers and dynamos and generators and the rest of that stuff that charged up Old Sparky and all the lights in The Walls and even some of the freeworld neighborhood out beyond in southwest Little Rock, along the Hot Springs highway. Fat Gabe and Short Leg took him back down to that hole, and Fat Gabe said, “Get your stuff.”
He didn’t have much to get: his change of underwear, his comb (he wouldn’t need it) and toothbrush, his harmonica, his 1914 calendar nearly all marked up, just twenty-nine days unmarked left to go, the Bible that Jimmie Mac had lent him and which he read for entertainment: the action stories of those old Israelites fighting the Moabites and Midianites and Ammonites and Philistines, and Old King Solomon’s song, which didn’t have much excitement in it but was real pretty, what the king said to that lady; that, and his copy of Dr. Hood’s Plain Talks and Common Sense Medical Advisor, which somebody had left behind in the death cell, eight hundred and ninety-seven pages he’d already read three times, no stories but interesting topics like “Sexual Isolation,” “Prostitution,” “Prevention of Conception,” “Diseases of Women,” and “Unhappy Marriages,” and hundreds of pictures he knew by heart now: vital organs, anatomy of men and women, diseases of the ear, eye, and throat. He thought of leaving it, but you never could tell when he might want to use the pages for the makes of a cigarette, not that he had any tobacco left, but you never could tell.
“I like it here,” Nail observed. “Why’ve I gotta move to the stockade?”
Fat Gabe hit him with the back of his hand swung hard across his face. “That’s twice this evenin you’ve ast me a question, Chism.”
Short Leg, who wasn’t as bad as Fat Gabe, had the kindness to explain: “You aint condemned anymore, at least not for right now. You caint stay in the death hole till you get another date set up with Old Sparky.”
Nail wiped the blood from his mouth and turned to call goodbye and good luck to Ramsey, the quiet murderer who’d been moved into Skip’s cell when Skip was killed. Ramsey did not answer. Then the two guards marched Nail up out of the electric light and power building, across the yard, and into the main building, to the stockade, which was just one huge room, a barracks with few windows covered with wire mesh as well as thick bars, in which three hundred men were crowded together. The beds were double-tiered, and, as Nail discovered, four men