Free The Choiring Of The Trees by Donald Harington

wasn’t too uncomfortable staring into them as long as she was examining them for the purpose of her drawing.
    Suddenly his eyes grew enormously large, and his whole body jumped, and the green-shaded overhead light dimmed. Bobo had thrown the switch! She heard a frantic screech, and realized it was herself. She had thrown down the sketchpad and jumped up from her chair and lunged toward Bobo and the switch, and she found herself clawing at Bobo and the switch and protesting as fast as she could talk, too fast to be understood.
    McChristian and Fancher were restraining her. “Take it easy, lady,” the obese McChristian was saying to her. “The switch aint on. It aint on. Bobo was jist foolin! He jist give it a teensy little spark, jist fer a joke.” To the executioner McChristian said, “Okay, Bobo, enough’s enough, you better jist wait for the warden and don’t be foolin around.”
    Viridis shook herself loose from the hands of McChristian and Fancher and looked at both of them indignantly, then gave Bobo her most scornful glower and asked, “What kind of monster are you?”
    “Hey, lady, I was jist givin him a little sample,” Bobo said. “He hardly felt it. But if ole Burdell don’t git back here soon, I might jist let my hand slip and give him the full dose.” Bobo fished out his bottle and took another swig, then offered it to Viridis. “Here. You act like a man, so be a man. You’re the only wo -man that ever watched me. Kind of guts it takes to do that can shore stand a swaller of this stuff. Drink it.”
    Viridis shook her head and returned to her seat, picking up the sketchpad from the floor. The drawing was smudged. She’d have to do one side of the face again. Her charcoal pencil was broken in half; she had another in her purse, but they hadn’t let her bring her purse into the execution chamber. She would use half the pencil as best she could, sharpening it with her fingernails. But first she took a scrap of newsprint out of her pocket and carefully wrote down exactly what Irvin Bobo had done and said. She intended to put it into the story if Tom Fletcher would let her write it.
    The subject was still staring at her, but this time, when her eyes met his, Nail Chism smiled and said, “Thank you.” Then he said, “You’re very brave. You could have got yourself hurt.”
    “There’s some things I can’t stand,” she said. It was the first almost conversational remark she had made in a long while.
    Warden Harris Burdell returned and, forgetting there was a woman present, began to speak coarse profanity. He swore obscenely, and then he announced, “The goddamn governor has done gone and granted Chism a stay. Git the fucker out of the chair, boys, and throw him back in his fuckin cell.” He turned and saw her. “Oh, shee- it, Miss Monday, I forgot you was here.”

Off
     
    T he last time I was in Little Rock, just a few years ago, for my sister Mandy’s funeral, I took some time off to go out Arch Street and look for the house where Viridis Monday had spent all of her childhood and adolescence. My granddaughter Sharon drove me, at my request; she’ll know why when she reads this. The house is still there, and the present owners have lovingly restored it to what must have been its original appearance, when the architect Charles L. Thompson designed it for bank vice-president Cyril J. Monday. I would guess that the original two colors of the house were a sort of tarragon with a trim of sage, and the present owners have taken pains to duplicate these colors exactly, giving the house its Victorian feeling of elegance relieved by fanciness and playfulness. It is a storybook house. Sixteen rooms, seven porches, two turrets (one with a domed cupola), a steeple, lots of wrought-iron trim and jigsaw decoration, fishscale shingles, miles of turned balusters and spindles, and maybe (I didn’t count) two dozen roof pitches, no two of them alike. I learned that this is called Queen