The Choiring Of The Trees (48 page)

There were no closets or cubbies or hiding-places in her studio. Just her easels and her supplies and the cabinet in which she kept her drawings, its flat drawers much too narrow to conceal anybody, but the sheriff pulled them out anyway, one by one, and asked, “What’s all this stuff?”

“Do you mind?” she said, not answering him. “You won’t find Nail Chism in there.”

The sheriff moved around the room, looking at its contents; he studied her most recent painting on its easel, a winter landscape of Stay More done from her sketches. She expected him to ask her if that was the village of Stay More, but apparently he did not recognize it as a village or as a landscape. His glance moved onward and came to rest upon the canvas bag, loosely closed atop her table. He picked it up, hefted it, asked, “Mind if I look in this?” and started to open it.

She did not have to lose her temper; it lost itself. “Sheriff Hutton! You have a warrant to search for a man, not to pry into my personal effects!” She lowered her voice: “Especially not items of…of feminine hygiene.”

“Of which?
Oh.
” The sheriff blushed and gingerly replaced the bag. “Sorry,” he said. He moved on around the room. “Never can tell,” he said. He headed for the stairs and went back down.

As the men were leaving the house, having satisfied themselves that she was not hiding Nail Chism, Warden Yeager said to her, “You’ll let us know hee hee if you run acrost his pawmarks hee hee, won’t you?”

“Don’t count on it hee hee,” she said.

The warden gave her a wounded look as if she had failed to return a favor. Come to think of it, she realized after the men were gone, she had.

They would not let her see Ernest at St. Vincent’s. She had to wait at the hospital and speak with the mother superior to request permission and explain that, while not related to Ernest Bodenhammer, she was the only person who had visited him regularly in the penitentiary. The mother superior was kind and considerate but had to inform Viridis that Ernest was under guard and also under heavy sedation. Possibly, Viridis could see him tomorrow, but she would need written permission from Warden T.D. Yeager.

All the rest of that day she stayed in the newsrooms of the
Gazette.
If any word came in of Nail’s having been spotted or recaptured, or anything at all, she could learn it faster in the newspaper office. Tom Fletcher did not mind her being there, but he advised her that several days might pass before any news developed.

And he was right. Many days would pass before she heard the first rumor that any trace of Nail had been seen, and even that would turn out to be a false lead. She was impatient to get on to Newton County and wait for him there. She had anticipated, when she planned to leave the canvas bag for him, departing Little Rock herself within a few days to go back to Stay More. She had been in correspondence with both me and the old woman in the Jacob Ingledew house who had been her friend and hostess during her previous visit to Stay More.

I had kept her informed of the swelling local sentiment against Judge Sewell Jerram and his gang. Strangely, his crony Judge Lincoln Villines remained popular enough to be touted as a possible candidate for governor (only in the event his friend George Hays chose not to seek reelection), but Sull himself was so unwelcome that a joke went the rounds about his having to pay Duster Snow time-and-a-half overtime wages to serve as his personal bodyguard. The good sheriff we’d had before Snow, W.J. Pruitt, had let everybody know that he intended to oppose Snow in the November election, and almost everybody planned to vote for him.

Viridis had written me to ask if I thought it was safe for Dorinda to return home. The school term in Little Rock had already come to a close when Nail escaped, and Dorinda was honestly homesick, or that’s what Viridis said; I had sort of been hoping that Rindy herself might write and tell me how much she missed us, but I suppose her penmanship lessons hadn’t got that far. I had told Viridis, after asking the advice of my parents, Rindy’s parents, and even John Ingledew, that Sull would have killed Rindy by now to silence her if he was ever going to do it; besides, the man was smart enough to realize that the point had long since passed beyond which her silence meant anything at all. He probably wished she did not exist and wished even more that she had never existed, but there wasn’t much likelihood he would be any further threat to her. Bring her home, I said.

Now Viridis was ready to do just that. She had taken Rindy out and bought her a fancy suitcase to take all of her nice new clothes and belongings back home with her. She did not intend to return Rindy to Stay More by the same means she had taken her out: riding double on Rosabone. No, she was going to arrange for a wagon in Pettigrew to meet their train and take them and their luggage (she was bringing more than one trunk herself, and hatboxes), with Rosabone tied behind, the miles across the mountains to Stay More.

I knew she was coming. But I did not know that Nail had escaped. That news didn’t reach us at all until the following Thursday, when we read it in the local newspaper. On the second page of the
Jasper Disaster,
under a small headline, nail chism makes his escape, was a brief condensation of the same story that had appeared in the
Gazette
five days before, now stale and unstirring. Remember, we had no telephones in Newton County, no electricity; all we had was the U.S. Mail, which wasn’t even the Pony Express. Later Viridis would apologize for not having written us a letter, which would have arrived several days before the newspaper. She had been too busy to think of it.

She was busy trying to get in to see Ernest without written permission from T.D. Yeager, who at that point wouldn’t have given her permission to breathe. On the third day after Nail’s escape, Tom Fletcher “smuggled” her into Ernest’s room as a
Gazette
reporter, and she was permitted to “interview” the boy for half an hour. He was awake and fairly cheerful, all things considered: all things such as having nearly every bone in his body broken: compound fractures of both arms and one leg, eight broken ribs, six broken fingers, a cracked pelvis, and a dislocated hip. Miraculously, his whole spinal column from neck to tailbone remained undamaged, and he would not be permanently paralyzed, as had been feared at first, although at the moment, and for the next six weeks, he wouldn’t be going anywhere, not even back to the penitentiary.

He enjoyed pretending it was a real interview. “Yeah, quote me as sayin these yere nuns feed me real good; I aint et like this in my whole life.”

“Mr. Bodenhammer,” asked the lady reporter, Viridis, “did Mr. Chism say anything to you about your intended destination?”

“Nome, he never. Tell ye the truth, I never even give it no thought whereabouts I was goin myself. I didn’t aim to light out for Newton County, whar he was a-fixin to go, but I never thought none about goin back home to Stone County neither. I aint got no friends up in them parts.”

“Did he say anything at all to you about his intended route to Newton County? Where and how did he plan to cross the Arkansas River?”

“Ma’am, he never hardly said a thing to me about nothin. I didn’t even know we was breakin out until you—until that there other lady who is his ladyfriend, she told me to be ready. But from the time he come down to git me out of my cell, until we said our good-byes, we never said nothin much atall.”

“I can’t imagine Nail Chism abandoning you like that,” she said.

“Aw,
hell,
Viridis, I mean, Miss Ma’am, he never
abandoned
me! I made him do it. I tole him to. It was hopeless, the way I’d done botched up my chance and fell forty feet, a-hittin that pole, and there wasn’t nothin he could do for me. Hell, I had to baig him to save his own skin and leave me alone.”

She put her hand on his cheek, which reporters don’t do. She left it there as she said, “I’m so sorry you didn’t get to go with him.”

“Look at the good side of it,” he said. “I was sposed to die Sat-tidy night, and I’m still alive. People are takin real good keer of me, and I don’t hurt too bad.”

“You won’t be able to draw again for a while,” she observed.

He wiggled the four fingers of his left hand that were not bound in splints or casts. “Didn’t you know I was left-handed?” he said. “I still got some fingers I can draw with.”

“I’ll see to it you get some materials,” she said. “I’ll arrange for you to get all you need to keep on drawing.” She paused. “I’d bring them to you myself, but I…”

He finished it for her, nodding his head to say yes, he knew. “You’re takin off for Newton County,” he said quietly.

She raised her chin into a modest nod. And then she did something that reporters don’t even think of doing: she bent down and kissed him lightly on the mouth.

“You’uns live happy ever after,” he said.

“You too” was all she could say.

Taking leave of her father was not quite as easy: he insisted on going with them to the train station. When she protested, he observed that from the looks of all the luggage she was taking with her, she intended to stay for quite some time.

“I’ll be back,” she said.

“But I doubt
she
will,” he said, indicating Dorinda. “I’d just appreciate the honor of seeing you two ladies off.”

So he went with them to the station. Viridis had made arrangements to have Rosabone transported on the same train, which would involve two transfers: one at Van Buren, from the Iron Mountain to the Frisco, and another, at Fayetteville, to the Frisco’s spur toward Pettigrew. Cyril Monday took the morning off from his job at the bank to see them catch their train.

At the station he drew her apart from Dorinda for a moment to ask, “You got all the money you need?”

What kind of question was that? For several years now, since her return from Europe, she had not been required to depend upon her father for any assistance beyond a place to live. “Enough,” she said.

“Never can tell what emergencies might come up,” he said. “My daddy always told me, you never know when you might meet some fellow selling two elephants for a nickel.”

She remembered Tom Fletcher’s old jokes about elephants in the Ozarks. This time Tom Fletcher hadn’t made any jokes, except one, of sorts: if she ever wanted to write a column called “An Arkansawyer in Stay More,” he had told her, he would pay their usual rate for it. When she had only smiled, not laughed, he had prompted, “It’s nearly as remote as Yokohama to me.” She had told him he ought to visit her there sometime.

She told her father, “Thank you, Daddy, I’ve got all I need.”

“Just never can tell,” he said. “Here,” and he thrust a roll of bills into her hand. “Put this in your purse and forget about it until you need it.” She tried to protest, but he touched his finger to her lips. “Better take it now instead of having to ask me for it later, when I might be in a bad mood.”

He had a point there. She put the thick roll of bills into her purse. “You’re sweet,” she said.

“I hope you’ll remember me that way,” he requested. And he had one other request: “Cyrilla wanted me to ask you, she said she couldn’t ask you herself, but if it’s okay with you and you don’t think you’ll need it anymore, can she have that studio of yours up in the north tower?”

Viridis raised her eyebrows. “Does she want to take up art?”

“Sewing. She wants me to buy her a sewing machine.”

Viridis smiled. “None of y’all expect me to come back, do you?”

“From the looks of it, no,” her father said, and then he moved back to where Dorinda stood, to tell the girl that he had enjoyed having her stay at his house and was sorry they hadn’t got better acquainted. He wished her a pleasant trip and good luck and a long and happy life.

“BOART!” hollered the conductor, and the three said their good-byes and exchanged hugs.

Viridis Monday left Little Rock.

Take any day in June in Stay More. School’s been out awhile, Mr. Perry the schoolteacher has left town to find a summer job in Harrison, the crops have been planted and are growing, nothing is ready to harvest yet except the snap beans and first spinach, nobody is really busy except the men cutting the hay and the timberjacks who keep on logging into ever more remote stands of the white oak forests.

My father never lost a chance to tell us girls that when school let out he expected us to help more on the farm, but every year school let out and he couldn’t seem to find enough to keep us busy. He complained to Ma and anybody else who would listen that if he’d only had him just
one
boy to help around the place, instead of all three of us worthless girls, he might be able to turn the farm into a cash proposition. As it was, he could only raise enough to feed us. We weren’t starving, not by any means, but we never had any cash money.

As the youngest of the three unwanted girls, I felt least wanted, so I tried hardest to help out around the place. While Barb and Mandy wouldn’t have been caught dead doing a lick of work outside the walls of the house itself, I got myself the job of tending the garden patch. I wouldn’t let a weed grow loose in that garden patch, and I spent a good bit of my summer out there in the broiling sun, underneath my sunbonnet but my dress all soaked through with sweat. I was pretty young when I discovered something important about the way the brain works: your thoughts are always better, more interesting, more lively, while you’re working than while you’re just sitting. I knew that the worst part of Nail Chism’s experience in the penitentiary was all the hours he had to do his thinking just sitting or lying around: the thoughts he had in those times must have been drab shades of gray.

Take any day in late June in Stay More and it’s apt to be real hot. Generally, I’d try to get my garden work done right after sunup, without even waiting for breakfast. There would still be dew glistening on the vines and sogging the greens. The dog Rouser would trot behind me out to the garden, which wasn’t but as far as from here to there the other side of what passed for Paw’s barn, and Rouser would just sit and watch me, or the morning birds, while I chopped weeds out of the garden. Then he would go with me afterward up in the holler behind our house, just a quarter-mile or so, to the falls. It wasn’t really a waterfall; it didn’t fall more than maybe five feet from the ledge to the pool; it was more of a cascade than a waterfall, but I called it the falls, and I was the only one in the family who used it. Barb and Mandy drew just enough water from the well to fill an oaken sitz tub about once a week, Saturday evening usually before they stepped out, and they’d share that water, Barb first because she was oldest and because she’d drawn the water, and stand, not sitz, in the tub and splash enough to get off the worst dirt and smells. But me, take an early morning in June in Stay More and you’d find me getting wet all over beneath my little waterfall up the holler. No, you’d not; because neither
you
nor anybody knew where I was, and I was stark naked and only a little bit uncomfortable that Rouser, who was watching me, was a male.