The Choiring Of The Trees (46 page)

Nail fished the bottle of mustard oil out of the waistband at the side of Ernest’s trousers. The bottle was only cracked, and there was a good bit of oil left. He began smearing it on Ernest. “I’ll rub this stuff on ye so the dogs caint smell ye, and I’ll drag ye off in the woods and—”

“You aint got time!” Ernest protested. “Please, Nail, git yoreself out of yere while ye still got a chanst!”

“I caint jist leave ye!” Nail told him.

“The hell ye caint! You’d be a damn fool not to. You’d regret it all the rest of the days they’d keep ye back in those walls before they fried ye! Go, goddamn ye, git and
go
!”

Nail heard the warden’s bloodhounds, who already knew Ernest’s scent, being taken out of their pens. Nail said, “I shore hate this.”

“Don’t make me baig again,” Ernest begged. “Jist go.”

Nail began to smear the mustard oil on his shoes and legs and arms and hands. Then it was all gone. “Ernest…” He tried to say some last words.

Then the lanterns of the tower guards found them, and he heard a guard yell, “THERE HE IS! THERE’S
TWO
OF THEM!”

“Go,” Ernest said, weakly. “Go, go, go on and go.”

“Good-bye, son,” Nail said. “Somebody will take care of you.” Then he sprang up and began running.

He heard the rifles firing. Were they shooting at Ernest? Would they kill a fallen boy?

In the dark, Nail could not keep running. It had been a long time since he had taken a good walk, and much longer since he had run. The dogs would be able to outrun him because they could see much better in the dark. But finding Ernest would slow them down. He hoped the guards handling the dogs would stop them before they started into gnawing on Ernest…if they hadn’t already shot him.

Nail paused at the edge of the swamp to catch his breath and listen. He heard the dogs behind him, in the distance, trying to find his trail. He had so much mustard oil on him they couldn’t possibly sniff him out unless the scent of him in the night vapors was enough to give them a lead. He turned and skirted the edge of the swamp and began looking for the sycamore tree. He hoped he was pointed in the right direction, to the southwest of The Walls. He could still see the penitentiary looming high on its knoll in the distance, and he saw how the ground dropped off sharply on every side. That was why the goddamn ladder hadn’t reached.

If he could find the sycamore and get that revolver loaded (or maybe she had already loaded it for him), he could shoot those dogs if any of them traced him, and shoot any man who tried to come after them. He plunged onward, and in the dark he could not keep the edge of the swamp clearly in view. He made a misstep and suddenly found himself up to his waist in water. For a moment the shock of the water took his breath away, but then he laughed, because it was the first time he’d been in water since his arrest nearly a year ago. This was his first bath in ages, and he loved deep water. He splashed briefly and then swam hard and fast until he reached the opposite bank of the swamp, and climbed up, and found himself within view of the tall sycamore tree splashing the sky with its fingers, shaking its dark-green mane.

He shook the water from himself; he was wet all over but would soon be in dry clothes. He was concerned that the water might have washed away the mustard oil, but a deep breath told him he still stank of it. He wanted to run up and hug that tree. So he did.

Viridis had told him there was only one tree in the vicinity; this one certainly dominated all the others around it, and at its foot he found the flat rock she had described to him: an ideal place for hiding something. But nothing was underneath it, and his groping did not discover any other flat rock nearby. Nail heard the dogs—running closer, he thought—and the distant voices of men.

Abruptly he remembered that this was Friday night, and Viridis had not planned to hide the cache until Saturday afternoon. If this had been Saturday night, he might not be alive. He was alive, but there was no cache: no canvas bag, no gun, no food, no money. He thought how hard it was going to be without those things that Viridis had meant for him to have. Would all of his planning, and all of hers, come to nothing?

Nail ran on. Or stumbled on; his wet trousers and debilitated condition kept him from running. He had a sense of direction. The sycamore tree was southwest of the penitentiary, but his destination was to the northwest. He veered. As he struggled onward, around the edges of other swamps, through some of them, getting wet again, he kept pressing to his right, turning slightly without, he hoped, starting a great circle that would take him right back where he came from. Eventually he came out on the cement of the Hot Springs highway, one of the first paved roads in that part of the county, and far up it he could see the headlights of automobiles approaching from the penitentiary road.

Quickly he crossed over the road and found himself in a lumberyard, among stack after stack of sawed and kilned boards. He remembered that many of the men in the barracks were sent out to work in this lumberyard and came back to the barracks smelling of the same fresh-cut wood that now surrounded him. He realized that all these boards had recently been trees in the forests, and those trees had died and stopped singing to make these piles of wood. Or maybe they had not stopped singing: maybe these piney, pitchy, turpentiney fragrances were the continuing song of the trees, who never died as long as they could still broadcast their odors. He moved among the stacks, finding himself in a labyrinth of lumber. The butchered trees imprisoned him. He hadn’t helped fell them or cut them, but now they menaced him and would not let him out. He thought of turning back to the highway, but the sound of the automobiles kept him from even turning that way in his frantic threading of the maze. It seemed to take forever to reach the back side of the lumberyard, where he broke free from the stacks of boards and found a high wire fence. He couldn’t get a toehold in the links of the fence to climb it. If he followed the fence, he would probably come back to the highway, where the cars patrolled. He gathered up some boards of different lengths and leaned them lengthwise against the fence, their butt-ends forming steps for his feet to get him to the top, where he threw a leg over and hauled himself up, and then fell blindly into the darkness beyond. The top of the fence was not barbed, but the sharp ends of the meshed wire snagged and ripped his clothes, and cut a gash the length of his trouser leg, which left him lightly bleeding.

From the fashioned timber of the lumberyard he plunged into a wild, virginal forest on hills that dipped and rose for several miles northward to the Arkansas River. Along the south shore of that river ran the tracks of the Rock Island Railroad, almost parallel to the Iron Mountain tracks on the north shore that Viridis had taken. The Rock Island tracks were his immediate destination: if he could reach them and get aboard a freight train and ride westward as far as Ola or Danville, he’d then be in a position to head north toward a crossing of the river that would get him to the vicinity of either Russellville or Clarksville, jumping-off places for Newton County.

For now, he had this forest to get through. He was already tired enough to drop, and growing hungry, and thirsty almost enough to risk drinking stream water, but although he found and crossed several rivulets and a creek, he would not risk drinking any water he could not see. Unless it was a spring and he could tell just from its feel or sound that it gushed or oozed directly from underground, he would not drink running water, let alone the still water of the swampy places.

Toward the first light of morning, when he figured he must have covered at least eight miles from the penitentiary, and no longer heard any automobiles or dogs or other sounds save the nocturnal soughing of the forest itself, his thirst drove him to dig an Indian well. It would slow him down, but he needed it badly. Near a still pond of water, downhill from it, using a piece of jagged sandstone for a shovel, he excavated a hole about two feet across, until the water began to seep in slowly from the pond. With the scoops of his hands he bailed it out. He let it fill again. He bailed it out again. The third time it filled, and had settled for a few minutes, it was full of filtered water, safe for drinking and for washing his bloody leg. His pants and shirt were still soaked, but he couldn’t tell, and didn’t care, if they were still wet from his plunge in the swamp or from his sweat or from both. He took them off, along with his underwear and his socks, the white cotton ones Viridis had given him. Naked, he dunked his clothes into the hole of water and stirred them around and squeezed them and dunked them again and took them out and wrung them, then hung them over a limb where the morning sun would hit them.

The sun rose about 4:30. A little over eight hours before, he had been a prisoner. Now he was free, and with his thirst slaked and his clothes washed, he began to appreciate his freedom for the first time. Naked, he did a little jig. He laughed. The morning birds watched him oddly. “Howdy, Mr. Sun!” he yelled, and heard his echo off in the woods. He was in a glade, and remembered my letter, and yelled aloud, “I’m glad!” but then he told himself to shut up, even if there was nobody to hear him or see him cavorting naked in the sunshine. He jumped into the pond and scrubbed himself, although without soap there was no way he could get all the mustard oil off his skin.

He gave his clothes a couple of hours to dry in the sunshine while he wandered around looking for something to eat. He was hungry enough to eat dandelions, and he did. But he also found a small stream, and from beneath its rocks he picked crawfish, then cracked open their tails and peeled them and ate them raw. It was the first fish he’d had in over a year and the first crawfish he’d ever eaten, cooked or raw; between that and the dandelion salad, he decided, he’d had an elegant little breakfast. And that filtered pond water was as good a beverage as any he could remember.

His clothes weren’t quite dry, but he put them back on and resumed his journey. Coming down out of the forest, he saw a house in the clearing and skirted it, but came to another house in a clearing beside a road and had to stay out of scent-range of whatever dogs were there. As near as I can figure by studying maps, he was approaching the Twelfth Street Pike, which today they call Kanis Road, due west of Little Rock. That part of it even today isn’t yet developed, and back then you’d scarcely believe that this rural scene was just about seven miles, as the crow flies, from the bed where Governor George W. Hays was sleeping. When Nail crossed the road, he neither saw nor heard anything coming. People were having breakfast; the odors of coffee and cooking bacon drifted to him and renewed his hunger. But the odor of him drifted to their watchdogs and started them barking. On the other side of the pike he entered another woodland and saw no more houses for another two hours of hiking.

The sun was well up in the sky before he came to another road. There was a small village that still bears on maps the name it had then, Ivesville, and he emerged from the woods to the west of it, saw it in the distance, and kept away from it as he approached that last highway he would have to cross before reaching the railroad tracks. Beyond the road on the horizon he could see the bulk of the volcano-like hill that is called Pinnacle Mountain. This road was traveled. He crouched in a ditch behind tall weeds to watch a wagon and team of horses going by, a farmer taking his family to Saturday market. An auto came along, and he stayed crouched down. The car was an open Ford, filled with city folks heading for the country. He waited until it was completely out of sight before he rose up. But then, from the direction the car had disappeared, a horse and rider approached at full gallop. He ducked down into the ditch again and hid and waited. The horse, a great roan mare, came into view; the horseman was wearing riding-breeches and whipping the mare’s hind end with a riding-crop…but as they came abreast of Nail, he saw that it wasn’t a horseman but a horsewoman, her red hair blowing out behind. Nail stood up abruptly and wondered if he was dreaming: it was Viridis! Horse and rider flew on past, toward the city.

He leaped out of the ditch. “VIRIDIS!” he hollered after her. He stood in the road and waved his arms. Horse and rider disappeared into the distance. He wanted to run after them but knew he couldn’t run. “VIRIDIS!” he called once more, but the noise of the horse’s hooves had deafened her.

What was she doing out here? Looking for him? If so, why hadn’t she been
looking
? She had been staring straight ahead, as if in a big hurry to get somewhere…or as if being pursued. Nail looked in the direction from which she had come, the west, to see if anybody was coming after her, but the road remained empty for a long time, and finally he crossed it.

He was almost certain it had been her. If she knew, as she ought to, that he was on the loose, and she was searching for him, why hadn’t she
looked
? No, he decided: just as she hadn’t known he was escaping Friday instead of Saturday, and thus had left nothing under the sycamore tree, she still did not know he was free. He knew that she took that mare of hers—what was her name? yes, Rosabone—she took Rosabone for rides out to Pinnacle Mountain. If only he had recognized her an instant sooner.

Soon enough he reached the tracks of the Rock Island, and followed them westward to a place where they began a curve and upward grade. There was a trestle across a small creek (my map calls it Isom Creek, flowing into the Little Maumelle River), and Nail sat beneath the trestle and waited patiently. Large fish lost their fear of him and swam within his view. He could have grabbed one with his hand, or flung it onto the bank, but he had no way to cook it and wasn’t about to eat raw bass. Noon came. He broke off several cattail spikes and ate them; he’d had them before and knew they were as good as wild asparagus, or better, raw. At a place along the creek bank where a spring flowed into the creek and he could easily separate the pure water from the creek water, he scooped up enough to wash down the cattails. While drinking, he heard the train coming.