The Choiring Of The Trees (55 page)

Nail screamed. The pitch and volume of his agonized bellow would have surprised him had he not momentarily blacked out. When he had resumed awareness and could still feel the searing torture in his shoulder joint, he became aware of the man’s words: “Jesus! I reckon they could hear ye all the way back at the stir.”

Nail groaned and sighed at length, and then asked, “The where?”

“The big house,” the man said. “Whar ye came from. The Walls.”

Nail eyed the man, at the same instant discovering that he could again move his right arm, although painfully. “How’d ye know?” he asked.

The man held up Nail’s shirt. “Use to wear one myself.”

“You break out too?”

The man nodded. “But before they even finished buildin her.”

Nail spent that night, and three more nights, with the man, who never told him his name. Nail knew that the only man who had ever successfully escaped The Walls and was still at large was named McCabe, so he assumed this man was McCabe, but he never asked. The coals of the fire that Nail had so carefully built in the other house were allowed to go cold. The man fed him well, catfish one night, duck the second night, more catfish the third, and the swelling went down in Nail’s shoulder until he could use his right hand again. They fished together: the catfish of the third supper was one that Nail had caught, a monster. They did not talk an awful lot; they made some casual conversation about the progress of the war in Europe and casually debated whether or not the United States should join the fight. The man was pro, Nail con.

But on the fourth day the man began to reminisce about The Walls and to ask Nail questions. “Is ole Burdell still runnin the place?” he asked, and Nail told him what had happened to Burdell and how T.D. Yeager had come in and taken over, and what sort of man Yeager was. The man eventually asked, “Is ole Fat Gabe still workin in thar?” and Nail related in detail the death of Fat Gabe at the hands of Ernest Bodenhammer, privately grieving anew over Ernest’s fate. But the man became so elated at the news of the death of Fat Gabe, whom he had loathed more than any man he’d ever known, that he decided to celebrate, and produced from some hiding-place a quart of genuine bottled-in-bond sippin-whiskey, James E. Pepper, which he had been saving for a special occasion or serious illness, whichever came first, and the two men consumed the whole bottle in short order and became loud and boisterous. With his shotgun and the help of his dog the man killed a possum, and they had for the fourth supper a wonderful meal of roast possum and sweet potatoes and hot biscuits, the meat fat and greasy and filling and delicious.

On the fifth day the man offered Nail the gift of the other house. The man pointed out its advantages, which were already obvious to Nail: seclusion, peace, privacy, an abundance of fish and game, and, for whatever it was worth, the man’s companionship and assistance. Almost with sorrow, Nail explained why he had to get on home to Newton County. There was, he said, a lady waiting for him.

The man regretted being unable to furnish Nail with a firearm, since he had only one, his shotgun. But he gave him a hunting-knife with a sheath that could be attached to the belt. And a bota: a water bottle made of goatskin. As well as a small wad of string, some matches, and two fishhooks, and finally a paper sack containing a dozen biscuits and some bits of leftover possum meat. Nail said, “I wush there was somethin I could give ye in return.”

The man pointed. “How ’bout that thar gold thing on yore chest?”

Nail fingered the tree charm almost as if to hide it. “Not this. This here was given me by that lady I spoke of, and it’s all that’s stood between me and goin off the deep end.”

“Wal, say howdy to her for me,” the man suggested, and clapped him on the back and walked him as far as the beginning of the trail that led to Plumerville. He told him how to get around the west side of Plumerville and over the old Indian boundary, toward the flatlands of northern Conway County.

Nail said in parting, “If you ever find yoreself up in Newton County, come to Stay More and visit with us.”

Then he followed the directions the man had given him, skirting the edge of Plumerville without being seen by a soul. When he got to the tracks of the Iron Mountain Railroad, the same tracks over which Viridis and Rindy and Rosabone had traveled en route to Stay More just that morning, he was tempted to wait for a freight he could catch and ride to Clarksville, but his experience on the Rock Island freight had made him leery of trains, and the stretch of track between Plumerville and Morrilton was too open and straight and exposed. He headed northward from the tracks and then crossed some low hills and picked up his stride across the flatlands leading into the village of Overcup.

His shoes were not of the best: soaked by the river crossing, dried too fast by the fireplace, they had shrunk, and were too tight and pinched for him to walk in them as fast as he had hoped, and even so had given him blisters.

He camped that night on a ridge overlooking Overcup, which is the name of an oak tree, so called because the husk, or cup, of its acorn nearly covers the rest of the acorn. The overcup is not a common oak, but there is an abundance of them around the village named after them. From his camp Nail could watch the lights of the village come on, and since he had been too busy hiking to stop and hunt, he considered sneaking up to the edge of the village to grab a chicken. But that would be theft, even if the chicken was running loose, not penned in somebody’s coop. Nail had never stolen anything in his life; he had never committed any crime, unless you consider his bootlegging a crime. And he was not starving; the previous night’s supper with McCabe was still fresh in his mind, if not his stomach, and he had a bit of it left in his paper sack.

He ate another of McCabe’s biscuits and finished off the possum as he watched the village until its lights had one by one gone out, and then he lay down on the soft earth beneath an overcup and gazed awhile at the sky and its vast expanse of starlight. A nearly full moon had begun to rise. The night was warm and clear and entirely silent except for the occasional distant baying of some dog. Nail began to sense for the first time the extent of his freedom: there was that enormous firmament of stars overhead, almost enough light to illuminate this enormous firmament of earth that surrounded him and in which he was free to roam or to lie still, as he chose, and he chose now to lie still. Then he slept.

The next morning, after two more of McCabe’s biscuits for breakfast, he climbed down from the ridge and sought a good place to skirt the village undetected and gain the trail that led to Solgohachia, his next landmark. Of course he did not know the name of Overcup, nor would he come to learn the name of Solgohachia, but those were the two villages I found on topographic survey maps I used to trace his probable route. None of those villages he would skirt or pass through—Round Mountain, Wonderview, Jerusalem, Stumptoe, Lost Corner, Nogo, and Raspberry—would ever become known to him by name, except the last, because he did not encounter anyone after leaving McCabe, and, even if he had, would not have stopped to ask questions.

Solgohachia happened to be the hometown of Sam Bell, who was Nail’s inmate in the death hole, sentenced there for killing four members of his divorced wife’s family (Viridis had called him a psychopath), but Nail would not have known this, for he would not have known it was Solgohachia he was stopping through, nor known the Indian legend surrounding the well where he had paused to draw himself a drink of water: a chief’s daughter had been married to a great warrior at this spot, and according to popular belief anybody who drank from this well would have a long and happy marriage; consequently, thousands of couples had come from miles around to Solgohachia to solemnize their weddings at this very spot, where Nail, unknowing, paused for a drink of water. Coming to and going out of Solgohachia, he found an abundance of usable arrowheads for his future bow and arrow, so he should have known that this had once been an Indian place.

Crossing through a gap of the hills between Solgohachia and Point Remove Creek, he nearly stepped on a large snake, whose checkerboard pattern might have misled a woods novice into thinking it a diamondback or a copperhead, but Nail recognized it for what it was, a nonpoisonous hognose, or spitting adder; and he took some time to observe and study it, hunkering motionless on his heels, so still the snake lost its fear of him. It was the first resumption of his nature study. All those months in the penitentiary, of all the pleasures of freedom he had missed, he had missed most his loving attention to the variety of the natural world. Nail was a naturalist of no small merit, but until now he had been too busy escaping the prison to stop and notice the welcome that nature was giving him on every hand. Almost as if Nature Herself had sensed his return to the watching of Her, She let loose a magnificent falcon, a red-backed male kestrel, what Nail would have called a sparrow hawk if he’d had anyone to call it to, and he dallied on his trek for nearly an hour near the tree in which the kestrel had its nest, watching it, and watching too the eventual appearance of the female.

Not long afterward he began the construction of his bow and his arrows. He fashioned the four-foot bow from a long stave of Osage orange, or bois d’arc (the same words from which “Ozark” derives), and the arrowshafts he made from willow. For three nights, in the lingering light after supper, he slowly trimmed and shaped the bow, careful not to whittle it with his knife but just to scrape it into shape. He had saved all the sinew from each animal he’d eaten, rabbits and squirrels alike, and had carefully dried and twisted it into a long bowstring. Leftover sinew went into wrapping the nock ends of the arrows and into tying the arrowheads to the foreshafts. For fletching, he used the feathers of a wild turkey he had surprised with his digging-stick used as a spear, having given up any attempt to hit a quail or partridge, both abundant but elusive.

When he had finished the construction of his bow and arrow, he spent an entire day practicing with it, slowed down on his hike by the necessity to stop and take aim and experiment with ways of holding his bow and his arrows and crouching in a shooting position.

The number of miles he covered each day diminished as the terrain became rougher and steeper: he had reached the Ozarks, and the uplifts had risen; some folks say everything above the village of Jerusalem is technically in the Ozarks; beyond that point he would certainly encounter no more flat plains. Between practicing with his bow and arrow, actually hunting with it, and struggling with the rugged inclines of Van Buren County, his progress slowed to no more than fifteen miles a day. His shoes had begun to fall apart, and he resewed them with sinew and a needle made from one of the fishhooks straightened; they still gave him blisters.

But with his new weapon he was able to kill anything alive and edible that crossed his path, or whose path he crossed: a raccoon, a pheasant, and even, while fording a stream, a large bass. He did not want for food, and he used the pheasant feathers to fletch more arrows and made himself a cap from the raccoon’s fur: although the heat of summer made a fur cap unnecessary, his still-bare scalp was often chilly, and he feared getting sunstroke while walking in the broiling sunshine at midday without a head-covering. But the pheasant and the coon had been small game; he did not feel that his marksmanship with the bow and arrow were yet sufficient to risk an encounter with a buck deer or a bear. He saw plenty of the tracks of both, and once he even saw a mother bear with her cubs, at some distance, upwind, and avoided them. Crossing over into Pope County from Van Buren County, into the wilderness near New Hope, he encountered an entire family of deer and crept up on them, upwind, and took careful aim at the buck from not more than twenty paces; he missed it with two arrows but hit it with the third, right behind the shoulder, wounding it enough to catch it and finish it off with the hunting-knife. It was a seven-point buck. He butchered it of its haunches and stuffed himself on spit-roasted venison, and then, too full to move for many hours, used the time of digestion to carefully skin the animal and prepare its hide for some future use. He carried the deerskin wrapped around his neck like a big cape thereafter, transferring it to his waist as the heat of each day came on, while he gained the headwaters of Illinois Bayou, a trackless wilderness of forest that left him feeling like a pioneer.

I have not been able to find out how the mountain settlement of Nogo got its name. I’m sure there are legends, or apocryphal attributions to some settler who penetrated as deep into the wilderness as the wilderness would allow, and who gave up in frustration because it was “no go” beyond that point. For Nail, it would become no go as well.

In a wild place called Dave Millsaps Hollow, just to the west of Nogo, Nail was picking blackberries when he discovered that he had some competition for the berry patch: a black bear. Almost simultaneously he and the bear happened to look up from their labor of picking berries and stuffing their mouths and looked directly into each other’s eyes from a distance of not more than thirty paces. Nail’s first instinct was to shift his eyes about quickly to ascertain that there were no cubs around, because a female with cubs would have attacked him instantly. As it was, she…or he…just snorted, as if to challenge Nail’s right to the berry patch. Nail stood his ground. The bear growled and lowered itself from its hind legs to all fours, and from that position commenced swaying to and fro while continuing to growl, its eyes locked upon Nail. He made a sudden shooing gesture with his arms and hollered, “Git!” but the animal did not git. Nail, who had encountered bears in his explorations of the Stay More countryside, guessed that the bear was about two years old and probably male, although he could not understand why the bear was not retreating at the sight of him, unless it was so possessive toward the berry patch that it did not intend to relinquish it. Again by instinct, Nail found himself reaching behind to take his bow and arrows, but even while bringing an arrow up and attaching the bowstring to the arrow’s nock, he attempted once more to frighten the bear. He stomped his feet and yelled, “Git outa huh-yar!” and then lunged toward the bear and waved his arms and his bow and shouted, “Go home!” For one instant the bear turned as if to flee, but then it changed its mind and, growling, charged Nail.