The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [55]
“Very weak pulse,” Doc Gode said.
The other fellow looked done for, Nail observed. He couldn’t recall ever having seen the man before; he was just one more convict among the hundreds; but Nail suddenly found himself inventing the man’s life: he had a wife somewhere out in the country and a whole bunch of children; he had a mother still living, and some sisters and brothers; he had worked hard all of his life, toiling in the sun, until the day he got in trouble and was sent to the pen. Probably he was hoping he could get a Christmas pardon and be home with his family.
“Mr. Burdell, sir, could I say somethin?” Nail discovered himself requesting before he could have the sense to stop himself. The warden turned away from the dying man and looked at Nail. Burdell didn’t say, Yes, go ahead, but he didn’t say, No, keep your trap shut, so Nail went ahead and said what he had to say: “Sir, I know that Fat—I know that Mr. Gabriel McChristian is jist doin his job, and I know it aint a easy job either. But I jist wonder sometimes if you know, sir, how evil he is. Evil. This world is full of cussed wickedness and cruelty, but when a feller gits a crazy pleasure out of causin awful pain to another human bein, he aint jist wicked or cruel, he’s evil, he’s criminal, he’s sick in the head. Don’t that bother ye none, sir?”
The warden just stared at him. Then the warden and Doc Gode exchanged looks. The black trusties exchanged looks, and one of them rolled his eyes up into his head. Finally the warden prefaced whatever response he was going to make by saying severely, “Chism—” but then he seemed to change his mind and adopt a milder tone, although it was a strain on him. “Nail, I know we aint perfect, none of us,” he said. “And ole Gabe is prob’ly the least perfect amongst us, shall we say? But evil? Evil, did you say?” The warden abandoned the effort to be polite. “Who the fuck are you to tell me about evil? You raped a kid, Chism. You grabbed a little girl and knocked her down and rammed your hot cock into her tiny little cunt! You tell me about evil! She begged you for mercy, and did you have any? Don’t you talk to me about evil, you miserable son of a bitch! I’ll show you what evil really is before you git your ass fried!” The warden whipped around and yelled at the trusties, “Git this bastard out to the yard!” As the trusties dragged Nail off his cot and toward the door, Burdell spoke up close to his face, shaking a long, trembling finger at the man dying on the other cot. “You know why he got beat? Huh? Because he was tryin to escape! I swear, Chism, when we git through with you, you’re gonna try real hard to escape.”
They took Nail out of the flyspeck room, out of the building, into the yard. It was a big yard, acres of empty ground between the building and the wall. They stood Nail up and told him to walk. But he couldn’t walk. They picked him up again and kicked him and hit on him and told him to walk. He walked a bit. It began to snow. At first just feathers but then heavy flurries. His bare head and his shoulders became covered with flakes. And his back, when he fell. The rest of the day they kept picking him up and making him walk. The blacks complained to one another of the futility of it, the dumbness of it, the monotony of it, but they kept on with their job.
The man in the flyspeck room died. Before they hauled him off for burial, they placed his body on the floor at one end of the barracks. Warden Burdell made a short speech warning against attempted escape, and Fat Gabe and Short Leg moved among the men, clubbing one who protested that the dead man had never tried to escape. When Burdell’s speech was finished, all three hundred of the men were lined up in slow lockstep, and each man, black and white, was required to bend down and shake hands with the corpse and say good-bye. Each man except Nail, who couldn’t lift his head from his bunk.
Fat Gabe came to his bunk. “Can’t move a finger, hey?” Fat Gabe asked, but Nail couldn