The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [56]
Nail lost track of time. He couldn’t remember having had anything to eat, he couldn’t recall ever being able to get up and go with the others to the mess hall, but he didn’t have any memory of anybody bringing him anything to eat. Probably he didn’t eat at all, for a week or so. But he didn’t have any memory of having to get up and go to the slop bucket either. Or use the floor. Strange, he didn’t know thirst even. His bunkmates began to try their best to pretend he wasn’t there. Toy said to him once, wonderingly, “Did you really truly rape a little girl?” All that Nail could manage was to mumble, “She wasn’t little.” And when it occurred to him to add, “And I didn’t rape her neither,” Toy had disappeared, and never spoke to him again after that. Another time, in the night, someone—he figured it was Thirteen—tried to insert a penis into his mouth. Nail had just enough strength to raise a hand to stop the action. The owner of the penis said, and it sounded like Thirteen, “You did it to that little girl, didn’t you?”
Nail discovered that if he tried hard enough he could shut out entirely the Arkansas State Penitentiary in bitter December and make it into a hillside of Stay More in the middle of June with his sheep all around him. He could do anything he wanted to, with those sheep. They would gambol into square dances when he played the right tunes on his mouth organ. The fescue was cropped a bronze-green by their grazing, but the orchard grass was still like emerald, and behind the green meadow rose the turquoise mountain, and beyond it the blue-green hills, and beyond those the light smoky blue of faraway Reynolds Mountain. When the sheep finished their dancing, they would crawl up leaf-dappled under the green shade of the big oaks at the edge of the meadow, and there they would kneel and nap, and Nail would nap with them, long in the summer afternoon, listening to the clear spring gurgle down the talus. When they woke up from their nap, they were whole and sound and sane and ready to play some more, and Nail would play his harmonica for them and feel almost well.
His bedclothes were often damp with blood and pus, and he couldn’t understand why, because his wounds seemed to have scabbed over enough not to be bleeding. Eventually he was able to determine that the blood and pus were coming from his bedmate, who was now Stardust, and he didn’t know if it was because they were flogging Stardust too; he tried not to listen when they were flogging somebody and the poor devil was screaming his head off. Stardust was not one to talk, anyway. But then Stardust began noticeably to take leave of his senses, as if he had not already left them long ago: he could be observed standing beside the bunk, moving his hands in the air as if building imaginary trees, root to bough, twig to trunk. That’s all he did, when he was not crooning. He would stand for hours making trees until Fat Gabe would come and cut him down and dump him in beside Nail, where he would bleed and ooze. Finally Stardust and his few belongings were gathered up and taken away to the state hospital for the insane…which, I have good reason to know, was not a better place.
As soon as Stardust’s spot was empty, they filled it with a new man, or a kid, rather, a boy maybe fifteen, sixteen at the most, whose hair reminded Nail of that woman’s, what was her nice lady name who came and what was it she pretty girl had hair that same reddish sort of, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, yes her name was Monday, that lady, this boy his hair