The Whippoorwill

Clive huddled against the stone wall in his cell, listening to his last night eke away. Birdsong trilled in the smoky blue-black dark, inviting all who heard to rejoin the awake and aware, to celebrate the coming dawn. Relentlessly cheerful, the whippoorwill shared his vigil, although if he had a palm-sized rock and a clear shot, Clive would have spent his time in the quiet.

Panic swelled inside Clive, and his heart thumped and fluttered behind his ribs. He swallowed, spit catching in his throat. His hand lifted to touch his skin there, and then rubbed the lack of sleep from his face. How much time? Was the light changing? Dawn, they'd said. He had until dawn, and then the gallows would call his name. The same bird singing so sweet outside his barred window would light on his cooling flesh and pluck threads from his coat, hairs from his head, to line its nest. He stared without blinking, willing the planet's rotation to slow, to return to him a shred of hope.

The bird continued its macabre serenade.

Clive's legs cramped and he paced the walls of his cell. He savored the pain in his muscles, and he paid conscious awareness to each of his senses as he hunched along. The hairs on his forearms stiffened as cool air brushed across them. The sky shifted to gray. Clive's heart hiccupped and his pace quickened. His eyes scanned every fissure between the stones in his cell, every slight divot in the packed dirt and straw of the floor. He trailed his fingers along the mortar as he strolled, murmuring along with the whippoorwill's song outside.

He paused at the window, the bottom ledge just above him. Fingers laced around the solid bars, he lifted his face to the fresh air. He savored the tastes of hickory and horses. He rolled grit between his fingertips, reveling in the miniscule edges roughing against the ridges in his skin. The sky was violet, almost light enough to follow individual leaves in the trees as they danced in the morning.

Clive leaned against the wall under the window, hands tracing the grooves between stones, when he felt the rough cement give. He didn't hope, but his fingers retraced the spot again, faster, with a deeper touch. More mortar crumbled at his exploration, dusting his shoes. He hadn't noticed before, but the seams around this stone were considerably wider than the others. Wider, and gouged into grooved tracks, as if someone before him had scraped at them for long hours.

He wedged his fingertips at the stone's corners and strained to shift it. The stone moved, if to an immeasurably small degree, and Clive gasped. He glanced up toward the light. Blue. Tinges of blue. He dropped to his knees and forced all his strength into his fingertips, willing the stone to move further. To slide from its place in the prison wall, to fall to the grieving floor soaked with terror and hopelessness, to allow him a chance to live.

Sweat greased his hands, flowing freely under his clothes and hair, and his grip slipped many times as the whippoorwill sang to him. Now, the song was less cheerful, rather one of wry challenge. Whippoorwill . . . with God's will . . . with God's will . . . Clive ran his tongue over his lips, capturing salt from his upper lip. With God's will. The bird's sending him a sign. If he doesn't surrender to death, if he fights past the pain of his bloodied fingers and broken nails and torn tendons in his struggle to free the stone, God would reward his faith. Never mind that the hole would be too narrow to force his way through, that the drop outside the wall was easily thirty feet to sharp-edged piles of quarry stone, that he was perhaps a minute's breath from the guard opening his cell.

God would reward him. Clive gouged into the unforgiving cement, tearing the tips from his fingers, blood spattering against his cheeks and pooling in the cracks around the stone. He tore at the wall, a frenzied grimace contorting his features. Breath rasped from his lungs, agony and exhaustion pulling against his newfound purpose.

The sky grew lighter, the sun just beneath the horizon. The whippoorwill's song ceased. Silence, but for the whisper of breeze against the building, through the small, square window of the cell.

Clive worked away, his destroyed hands swollen, unable to reach the mortared grooves any longer but still slapping against the stone in stubborn attempt, his broken, animal sobs becoming ragged. The even steps of the approaching guard sounded outside his cell but Clive continued, his faith unflagging. With God's will.

The key turned in the lock, and the door swung in on rusted hinges and a prolonged creak. The smell of peat fire seeped in from the inner room.

"What's this, then?"

Clive refused to acknowledge this agent of the Devil. Faith, have faith. He collapsed against the wall, cheek to bloody stone, weeping in open anguish as the guard shook his head.

"Your time is near, convict." He nudged Clive with his boot, his nose pinched. "Up with you. Don't fret, it's a short walk to your Maker." He chortled.

Clive tilted his head and glared into the young man's face. He said nothing, but smashed his misshapen fists into the wall one last time, screaming through a throat so raw he tasted blood. He screamed until he lost consciousness, until he lost the last of his faith, and his body slid to the floor.

# # #

As his body swung from the gallows, life wrenched from his flesh by the hangman's noose hours before, a lone bird perched on the crossbeam above him. Dusk fell, and the whippoorwill called.