The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [52]
He heard a voice say, “Turn him around,” and the two blacks who were keeping him from reaching his dagger and murdering Fat Gabe turned him toward his assailant, who was wearing a look as if he were not tired but enjoying himself, and who swung back the strap aiming to lash Nail on his genitals.
He begged for the first time in his life. “No!”
But Fat Gabe hit him there, and it was much worse than being hit on his buttocks. Even the torturer seemed to retain a shred of fellow-feeling to realize how hideous the scourging must have felt, and he was not putting the full force of his swing into the blows but checking them so that they slapped against Nail’s genitals without cutting, only stinging and bruising. Nail lost consciousness.
How much later he came to he couldn’t tell, except that it was dark and there was a face close to his own, speaking to him. The voice was Toy’s, and Toy had very bad teeth, which gave his breath a rancid stench, especially so close: they were lying side by side in the lower bunk. “They done that to me last week,” said Toy. “It helps if you kind of draw your knees up towards your chest. Here, you can have my space to draw up your knees. Like that. It keeps your balls from killing you. Don’t it? Do you feel some better that way?”
“Hush,” Nail said. “Let me sleep. Thanks.”
“You know what they strapped me for?” Toy went on. “At dinner once Stardust wouldn’t eat his bread, sometimes he don’t eat at all, and once when he left his bread like that I was real hungry so I took it and ate it. You know we aint supposed to touch nobody else’s food ’ceptin our own?”
“Yeah, that’s the rule,” Nail said. “Let’s be quiet now and go to sleep.”
“One of them nigger waiters saw me grab it, and he reported me, and I got twenty lashes behind and ten in front.” Toy sighed, and his sigh carried a full blast of fetor.
“Fat Gabe is the meanest feller on this earth,” Nail remarked. “Now hush. Shh. Let me sleep.”
“It wasn’t Fat Gabe that put the strap to me. It was the warden,” Toy said. “Mr. Burdell.” And Toy went on talking. He seemed on the verge of telling Nail his whole life’s story, and Nail began to crave some ventilation. Toy was born in Lonoke, Arkansas, and had been all the way to Memphis, a big town. He once went to a whorehouse in Memphis. He’d saved up his money from picking strawberries and wanted to find out what having two women simultaneously would be like. He picked out a light-haired one and a dark-haired one. Nail told himself that Toy must have had better teeth in those days, or no woman would have come near him. Toy began to tell what each of the women had done to him, or let him do to them.
“’scuse me,” Nail interrupted suddenly. “I need to go out real bad.” He climbed out of the bunk and painfully stood up, clutching his groin. He was not going out, of course, but he needed to find the pot, not just to get away from Toy; he was suddenly very sick in his bowels. If he didn’t get to the pot soon, he’d mess his pants. The barracks had a couple of those enameled tin slop buckets: a white enamel one for white men, a black enamel one for black men. In the dark it was hard to tell them apart, but Nail didn’t care. At least he had the decency to use the pot; most