The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [47]
sleep, that lovely smile, only this time it wasn’t smiling but looking sad because he was sitting in Old Sparky waiting for Bobo to pull the switch. Only it wasn’t really him, it couldn’t be him, because there he sat beside Vernice Monday, that was sure enough him. Then who was this him sitting here in this electric chair? He looked at his strapped arms and saw they were black. He realized that this evening wasn’t the evening of the day before, December 2nd, his day, but the evening of October 31st, time had gone all the way back to Halloween, more than a month before, and he was a black boy named Skipper Thomas, who had been accused of killing his white lady that he worked for, although nobody’d ever seen him do it or had any evidence whatever and he’d worked for her long enough to know that it was her own nephew who’d done it so he’d get the money she left, but it was too late now, there was Mr. Burdell the warden with his hand in the air, and now he drops his hand, and I feels it! I feels the current coming up my legs and down from my head and meeting in my innards and there’s Mr. Bobo with his dull dumb blank look like he’s just absentmindedly broken off a limb from a bush, only it’s not a limb it’s the switch-handle, the switch-handle is down, the current is surging, my body is rumbling like a freight train, my head is shaking awful, I am biting my tongue nearly in two and trying to say to the trees, Save me, trees! Oh trees, save me! I’m not ready to die-ie-ie-ie! and I am trying hard to keep my heart still beating, my heart is pounding to keep from ever stopping, my heart will go on and on, although my head begins to hurt like no headache I’ve ever known, my legs are shot through with the pain of a thousand needles, my skin is all on fire, my stomach is boiling and about to come up through my gullet and into my mouth, I am in awful pain! and Mr. Bobo unbreaks the broken twig, he raises the switch-handle back up to where it was, and I know that I have lived! The current has not killed me, my heart beats strong, I am still alive, but the pain! The good God never intended for any of His mortal creatures to feel a pain as terrible as this, to burn like this. I look at Miss Maris Monday and her face is all stricken in what she knows must be my pain, and I look at Mr. Nail Chism sitting there beside her and he too has clenched his jaw and his eyes are stricken not because he knows this is what he too is going to have to endure come December but because he knows that no human being not even a worthless black nigger like me who shouldn’t have been born in the first place ought to bear such hideous agony as this death that burns and tears and strips all of my flesh and soul except my heart which still beats strong and wants to live! and Mr. Nail Chism’s eyes get wet and he yells, “Goddamn you, Bobo, turn up the juice and leave it on!” and sweet-faced lady Miss Berdis Monday puts her hand on his arm to calm him down. Mr. Bobo looks at Mr. Burdell the warden and Mr. Burdell nods his head once and Mr. Bobo pushes the switch-handle back down and once more I feels it! Once more I feels the divine almighty current charge like a thousand horses running through my veins and the violent fire burns away my pain for one long forever although my teeth are one by one jarred loose in my mouth and my eyeballs get rolled back inside my head so that I am blind and can no longer see the sweet but stunned face of Miss Vernice Monday and the sympathetic scowl of Mr. Nail Chism and I can’t see nothing only the raging of the horses that trample upon my heart but still can’t make it stop. The horses give up. The current stops. My eyes are blind, my nose is stopped by the stink of my burning skin, only my ears can hear the voice, it’s no angel coming for to carry me home but that warden Mr. Burdell: “Is he dead?” No, I am not dead, but I have now abandoned God before He ever had a chance to abandon me: I have done went and quit Him for eternity because no God however powerful or wrathful could create the kind of pain that wracks me now: this kind