The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [48]
I spit out my fallen teeth to free my tongue, and I cry, “Mo juice! In de name ob de Debbil, mo juice!”
A hand was shaking Nail’s shoulder, and he raised his head from the concrete floor. The first light of dawn was coming into the barracks, and the face peering into his own was that of the mute Stardust, who was not now mute: “Is it orange juice you’re asking for? We don’t have any.”
Nail sat up and gave his head a toss to clear it. “What?” he said.
“You were screaming for juice,” Stardust said. “We haven’t even water to drink. If you are very thirsty, I will pee for you.”
“Leave me alone,” Nail said, and turned away and tried to sleep again.
The only advantage to being in the stockade instead of the death hole, he discovered later that day, was that in the stockade you were sometimes allowed to go to the visit room, a wooden shack built up against the high brick wall of The Walls, which had one door leading through the wall to an anteroom, beyond which was the outside world. The visit room was divided down the middle by a screen of heavy wire that nothing larger than a nail could pass through. A trusty-guard with a shotgun and a pair of bolstered six-shooters guarded the room. Once a month you were allowed one visit to the visit room, for not more than fifteen minutes…if you had anyone who wanted to come and talk to you. Many of the men never had any visitors. If you were in the death hole, you were not allowed to go to the visit room; the only visitor who could come to the death hole was Jimmie Mac the preacher, or your lawyer, if you had a good one, or, the day before your death, your mother or wife or sweetheart. Nail’s mother had not been able to make the long trip from Stay More.
But Nail had a visitor his first day out of the death hole. Short Leg came and got him and escorted him to the visit room. It had been so long since he’d last seen his older brother that he hardly knew him.
“Waymon!” Nail said, and he wanted to ram his manacled hands through the wire screen so he could shake hands with old Waymon. “What’re you doin here?”
Waymon grinned. “Came to take yore body home,” he said. “You know them two ole mules, Spiff and Greeny, that you used to hire out from Ingledew’s to take yore wool to Harrison? Wal, I’ve got ’em right out’s yonder, hitched to a wagon with a coffin in it, purtiest piece of carpentry ye ever seen. Took me ten days to git to Little Rock, cold as it’s been.”
Nail couldn’t help laughing, and when he laughed, so did Waymon. The guard looked at them as if they’d gone crazy. “I shore hate to disappoint you,” Nail said, “and make you go home empty-handed.”
“What have they done to ye?” Waymon asked. “Brother, you look lak somethin the cat drug in. Got a knot on yore bald haid the size of a baseball. And all them bruises! What did they beat ye up fer?”
“Askin too many questions,” Nail said. “Leastways, I’m alive.”
“Shit, I never liked to stand around through a funeral, nohow,” Waymon said. “And it would’ve cost us forty dollars for yore headstone. Paw spent the last cent we had for that new lawyer, Cobb.”
Nail did not find that funny. “That right? He oughtn’t’ve done that.”
“And mortgaged the farm besides.”
“Mortgaged?” Nail was indignant. “Who put the mortgage on us?”
“John Ingledew,” Waymon said. “The Jasper bank wouldn’t even talk about it. But Ingledew’s bank needed the business, I reckon, and he give Paw three hunderd dollars for the whole place, includin Maw’s old eighty.”
Nail’s hands spread against the chain of the handcuffs as if he were trying to break it. “I’ll kill that son of a bitch.”
“Naw, Nail,” Waymon said. “Ingledew’s doin us a favor. All them Jasper folks is on the side of Sull and Duster Snow and them. Wasn’t for John Ingledew, we couldn’t never’ve got ye that new lawyer.”
“How is Paw?” Nail wanted to know.
“Porely,” Waymon said. “But not on account of this business. You know he’s had that heart dropsy for