The Choiring Of The Trees (23 page)

At breakfast the next morning (Viridis had slept wonderfully and warmly on a thick mattress stuffed with goose down, beneath several heirloom quilts, in a big walnut four-poster in the one of the three front rooms that had been Sarah Ingledew’s) the gracious old woman, urging a second helping of bacon and eggs on Viridis, said, “You aren’t intending to wear
those
today, are you?” and indicated Viridis’ jodhpurs.

“I expect to do a good bit of riding,” Viridis explained.

The woman shook her head. “You might do some riding, but you won’t do any visiting if you wear those.” And when breakfast was finished, she suggested they take their third cups of coffee back into Sarah’s room. Viridis, the woman observed, was the same size that Sarah had been. The woman opened a walnut wardrobe, then took down a dress and held it against Viridis for a moment, replaced it, and took down another, until she had one that she considered “not too dressy but good enough.” Viridis protested that she couldn’t ride Rosabone in that dress. “You aren’t going to ride Rosabone,” the woman said, and then selected the shoes, which were twenty years out of style and unlike any that Viridis had ever worn. And then the hat, or bonnet, rather. And a shawl. “And now the finishing touch, what Sarah called her thanky-poke,” the woman said, giving Viridis a purse to carry, a purse larger and fancier than any she would ever have dared hold in Little Rock. The woman turned Viridis to look at herself in the mirror and commented, “I declare, if it weren’t for your red hair, you
are
Sarah.” Viridis felt a bit uncomfortable, not because of the fit of the clothes or their being twenty years out of fashion but because she felt she had no right to be wearing the clothing of the former first lady of Arkansas. She expected to do a lot of local traveling and interviewing today, and she didn’t want to expose the clothes to dirt and dust and snow and mud.

The old woman dressed herself in attire that was also from an earlier era, the 1890s, and then she led Viridis out of the house, down the steps, and across the road to Willis Ingledew’s General Store. The storekeeper (who was also postmaster of Stay More that year) was in his customary captain’s chair facing the large potbellied stove whose stovepipe rose three floors straight up to the roof as the centerpiece surrounded by the balcony of the second floor, where the clothing and shoe departments were. There were a dozen other men sitting in chairs or on bulging wooden kegs within the radius of the stove’s warmth. Two of these men faced each other across a cracker barrel atop which a checkerboard had been placed, but the men, Viridis noticed at once, were playing chess, not checkers.

One by one the men looked away from the stove or from the chessplayers and took notice of the two ladies who had entered the store. One by one the men’s jaws dropped open.

“How be ye, boys?” the old woman said. The response, she later explained with a light laugh to Viridis, was exceptional: it was customary for a man greeting a woman simply to touch the brim of his hat, or perhaps just to raise his hand in the direction of the brim, or, at the very most, to grasp the crown of the hat and gently raise it before setting it back down. Each one of these men whipped his hat entirely off his head and held it to his heart, and some of them even stood up. Holding their hats thus, they chorused, each and severally, “Howdy do, ladies,” and “Fine mornin, ma’ams.”

The storekeeper, Willis, standing up, was nearly as tall as Nail. “I’ll be jimjohned,” he exclaimed, looking at Viridis. “You shore guv me a turn. I thought fer a secont thar ye were Grammaw. Don’t she put ye in mind of Grammaw, Paw?” he said to one of the seated men, a very old man who simply nodded and didn’t take his eyes off her.

“This here gal is Miss Verdus Monday,” the old woman said, in a thick approximation of the local speech. “She hails from Little Rock, and come all the way here jist to see what she can see about Nail Chism’s trouble. She thinks he’s blameless. Don’t ye, gal?”

Viridis had never before in her life been called upon to speak in front of a group, especially not a males-only enclave of general-store loungers. At first she could only nod in response to the question, but then she found enough voice to add, “Yes, and I hope all of you do too.” She looked around at them, one by one. Each man was nodding his head.

“Willis, have ye still got that phaeton yore grampaw was so partial to?” the old woman asked the storekeeper, and when he nodded, she said, “We’d be obleeged to ye iffen ye’d hitch her up so’s this gal could git up towards the Chism place.”

“I’ll carry ye myself, ma’am,” Willis offered.

But the old woman said, “No need of that, Willis. Jist hitch it up to two of yore best hosses and bring it around.”

As Willis exited through the rear of the store toward his livery barn, one of the others said to the women, “Don’t ye gals be rushin off. Stay more and pull ye up some cheers or kaigs.”

“Yeah,” invited another man, “lift yore hats and rest yore wraps.”

“She’ll be back directly, I reckon,” the old woman said. “Won’t ye, gal?”

“I’d like to talk with each one of you about Nail,” Viridis said.

“Shore thang,” they spoke or grunted assent: “Any old time.” “You bet.” “Come back when ye can visit more.”

Outside, the old woman indicated the phaeton that Willis was bringing into the road and asked Viridis, “Ever driven one of these? I’d go with you, but I think you’d feel more comfortable on your own, wouldn’t you, now? Look, you turn right at Jerram’s corner up there and you’re on the Right Prong Road. Stay on it eastward without turning off to the left or right until you’ve reached the top of that mountain yonder. You’ll see the Chisms’ house on a cleared knoll set back from the road a ways on your left. Nancy Chism is going to be tickled to see you. So will they all. If I don’t see you at bedtime, I’ll know they talked you into staying. But come back when you can.”

“I don’t know how to thank you,” Viridis admitted.

“You’ll thank me enough with the pleasure of your company,” the lady said.

Viridis drove the two-horse phaeton without any trouble, although she’d never driven one before. She drove in the direction she had ridden Rosabone the night before, up between the clinics of the two doctors, past the stone bank building, right at Jerram’s store, which would become mine, right on the road I live on but not turning to the left on the Bournes’ trail. I wasn’t there anyway that morning. I was in school, across the creek, the other way. All oblivious to her driving the fine phaeton of Governor Ingledew right past my turnoff, I was standing at my desk reciting for Mr. Perry a poem from our reader, William Wordsworth’s “Lucy Gray: Or, Solitude.” It is about a lonesome young girl who gets sent on an errand in a winter storm and disappears, and it always brought a tear to my eye, especially when they traced her footprints in the snow as far as the middle of the bridge, and then no more.

—Yet some maintain that to this day

She is a living child;

That you may see sweet Lucy Gray

Upon the lonesome wild.

O’er rough and smooth she trips along,

And never looks behind;

And sings a solitary song

That whistles in the wind.

I never thought that “behind” could rhyme with “wind”; you’d have to change the way you say one or the other, and I didn’t, as I read it, and Mr. Perry didn’t correct me, and the way I pronounced “wind” was lost anyway beneath the sound of a sob from Dorinda, who then commenced another one of the crying jags she had all the time these days. As I said before, she no longer shared my desk; she had been moved, first down to where the third-graders sat, but then Mr. Perry had completely lost patience with her and had her sit over to one side of the first-graders, big enough to be their mother but too big to share a desk with any of them, so she was just sitting on the stool that Mr. Perry sometimes used for the dunce’s corner and had to borrow from her when he needed to make somebody sit on it there, and of course there were jokes about her being our permanent dunce, with or without the corner. Whether or not she was dumb enough to be with the first-graders was questionable, but she certainly cried more than any of them ever did. The least little thing would set her off, and I should have known when I read “Lucy Gray” that it was going to give her a real fit of weeping. If only she knew that the lady who was going to save her soul was on her way up to the Chism place!

Up on the lilting mountain far above the village is a farmplace so old the trees still sing of it. There is a pretty trail rising from the village of Stay More to the farmplace; the trail meanders all over creation before it gets up there, and from places along it you can see forever across the hollers and the hills. The trees singing their fool heads off were a fat maple whose name I wish I knew and a gangling walnut I’d have to call a lady’s name were I to dub it, neither of them with even a leftover brown leaf from last autumn, although their buds were swelling and the only green in sight, save the copse of cedars and the first sign of new grass, were the nests of mistletoe in the upper limbs of the maple, mistletoe a shade of green that you only see in winter, winter’s green, which has a special song of its own. I wish Viridis could have heard these trees a-yodeling like crazy as she drove into sight of them, and maybe she did, for all I know. I don’t know everything about this story.

I know how Nancy Nail Chism had been listening, not to her trees a-warbling but to the coffeepot a-rattling on the stove, sometime before: a sure sign that company was coming. While she was drying the breakfast dishes, she had dropped the towel, and that means a stranger will arrive very soon; she watched to see if she’d drop it a second time, which means the stranger will be hungry and need something to eat, but she didn’t. Seth Chism had dropped his case knife while he was eating: that was proof the stranger coming would be a female; if he’d dropped his fork, it would have been a man on his way up the mountain. “Seth!” she’d said to him when he helped himself to some more of the elderberry jam even though he already had some on his plate; if you absent-mindedly help yourself to something you’ve already got on your plate, it means the stranger coming will be hungry for the same thing. While she’d drunk her own coffee, Nancy had paid close attention to the cup and noticed that coffee grounds were clinging to the sides of it, which was a sign that the visitor would be bringing good news. Also, her left eye was itching; if her right eye had started itching, it would have meant that the visitor had bad news.

So even before Viridis drove into sight, Nancy knew this much about her: she was a woman, and she was coming to visit, and she would want some elderberry jam, and she would bring good news. Thus the only thing surprising when Viridis came driving up into the Chisms’ yard was that she was driving old Jake Ingledew’s phaeton and was wearing old Sarey Ingledew’s visiting-clothes. Nancy’s first thought was that the lady had the wrong house, but all those signs couldn’t have been so far wrong. So Nancy went ahead and declared, “Howdy. We’ve been lookin fer ye.”

Had Nail got word to them? Viridis wondered. She saw at once how Nail resembled his mother: Nancy had given him not just his eyes but his eyebrows, his long nose with its strongly shaped end, and his full mouth. Nancy was in good health, and it was almost like seeing Nail the way he ought to be.

“I’m Viridis Chism,” she said, but then she put her hand to her mouth and corrected herself. “I mean, I’m Viridis Monday. You must be Nancy Chism.”

“Yes’m, that’s me,” Nancy acknowledged.

“I’ve come from Little Rock to talk to you about your son Nail.”

As Nancy told it later, the good news that she’d learned to expect when she’d seen the coffee grounds on the side of her cup was simply that Viridis Monday was
here.
Not that she brought word of any governor’s pardon or Nail’s escape or even that Nail was in good health, but that Viridis Monday was here to tell what she knew, to find out what she wanted to find out, to do what she wanted: to learn everything about Nail; to convince herself of what she already believed: there was no way Nail could have done what he’d been convicted of; and then to do what she intended to do: get everybody to sign a petition, which would go to the governor.

Viridis spent the whole day with the Chisms, not just Nancy but also Nail’s father Seth, and his younger brother Luther, and Nail’s older sister Irene, who had once been the wife of Sull Jerram and was, in fact, still married to him. Viridis would come back again later, several times, but this first day she would talk with the Chisms all day, or until time for school to let out, when she would come looking for me. Viridis listened to Nancy tell the whole story of Nail’s life, such as it was, not very exciting or eventful or anything to brag about. In the whole house she had just a couple of photographs of Nail that she could show to Viridis, one taken by Eli Willard the year he first brought the camera to Stay More, and another one Nail had made up in Eureka Springs, the farthest he’d ever been from home until they took him off to Little Rock. The Eureka photograph was one of those trick pictures with props where you pose in front of a fake scene, and it showed Nail dressed in some Wild West costume with sheepskin chaps and a ten-gallon hat and a pair of six-shooters, standing in front of the Palace of Versailles, an incongruity that was lost on subject and photographer. But it was a good picture of Nail at the age of nineteen, handsome and sightly. Viridis asked if she could borrow the picture and have her newspaper make a copy of it, and she would return the original.

Spreading her elderberry jam on her biscuit, Viridis asked, “Did Nail ever have a girlfriend?”

Nancy Chism laughed a bit. “I have to tell ye a little story,” she said, and she told about Nail’s very first girlfriend, sort of. When the McCoys used to live at the next place down the road, the place where Waymon Chism lives now with his wife, there was a little girl named Dorothea Lea McCoy, about the same age as Nail, three, and sometimes when Mrs. McCoy came to visit with Nancy, she’d put “Dorthlee,” as everybody called her, out in the yard to play with little Nail, under that maple tree that he thought was his own. Sometimes Dorthlee would get permission to walk up the road from her house to play with Nail under the maple even when her mother wasn’t visiting Nancy. One day Dorthlee came running into the Chism house hollering, “Miz Chism, Nail’s a-pickin yore flars!” and Nancy went out to discover that Nail was helping himself to the marigolds, making a bouquet. “Course I had to whup ’im fer it, for he knew better,” Nancy explained to Viridis. Another time, later in the summer, Dorthlee again came running into the house, saying, “Miz Chism, Nail’s a-pickin yore flars!” And once again Nancy found her son out in the flower garden, making a bouquet of zinnias. And once again she had to take the hairbrush to his backside.