The Choiring Of The Trees (57 page)

He looked down at his knees, and, sure enough, he had been crawling among squash vines. “I’m right sorry,” he said. “I didn’t notice it was yore guh-yarden.”

“Whar ye from?” she demanded.

“Stay More,” he said, but her blank look told him she had never heard of it, and he added, “Up in Newton County.”

She inclined her head over her shoulder. “That’s a fur piece up yonder,” she said.

“How fur?” he asked.

“You don’t know?” she challenged.

“I aint never been in this part of the country afore,” he said.

“Wal, it’s ever bit of seven mile to the county line,” she said.

He laughed, partly with pleasure. “That’s all?” he said. And then he exulted, “I’m jist about home!” But by then exhaustion, from having climbed the mountain and encountered a stranger, had taken hold of him: he abruptly lost his balance on his knees and fell over and then just lay there on his side, unable to rise.

“Air ye porely?” she asked, with some solicitation, dropping the muzzle of the shotgun. He could have reached up and yanked it out of her hand if he had wanted.

“Jist tard,” he declared, weakly. “Jist real tard.”

“Come sit in the shade of the porch, and I’ll fetch ye a drink,” she offered, and with surprising strength for a woman lifted him up from the ground so that he could stagger onward to her house.

He stayed to supper. More than that: he stayed the night. The woman—her name, she said, was Mary Jane Thomas—had two children, a girl of five named Elizabeth and a boy of three, Edward Junior, who were fascinated with this strange visitor wearing coonskin, deerskin, bearskin, and carrying a bone air. Edward Thomas Senior had been killed in an accident down to the sawmill two years before, and Mary Jane had stayed on at the homeplace, making a decent enough living off the land. This place was called Raspberry; there were two other families down the trail not too far, and that was it: Raspberry, Arkansas, population eighteen.

From Raspberry to Ben Hur, which was in northernmost Pope County, almost on the Newton County line, was indeed only seven miles, and this closeness to home (even though Ben Hur was still a good thirty or thirty-five miles from Stay More) was the reason Nail resisted Mary Jane’s suggestion to stay awhile, or even forever if he had a mind to. She served him a magnificent supper: chicken and dumplings with sweet corn on the cob, a mess of fresh greens, snap beans, sliced tomatoes, and for dessert a blackberry cobbler with real cream. After putting the children to bed, she used the rest of the cookstove’s heat to warm up some water for a good bath for Nail, with real soap, and a shave if he so desired (he did), and a change of clothes: he could help himself to what was left of her late husband’s wardrobe, such as it was; Eddie Thomas had been roughly the same size, not quite as tall, as Nail. But before Nail put on his fresh shirt and trousers, she insisted on inspecting his wounds. She wanted to know how he had got each of them, and without going into detail about his crossing of the Arkansas River he explained that this wound had come from the sharp stob on a log and this wound had come from the claws of a bear, and so had this one, and these were tick bites or chigger bites, of course, and these were just blisters from his shoes, which were too tight. She gave him a pair of her late husband’s boots, which fit too. She concocted a salve or ointment of some herbal or vegetable matter (he could only make out the smells of polecat weed and mullein leaves), which she insisted would help his cuts and bruises and scabs, and put it on the bad places for him. It was soothing. She offered him the makings of a cigarette, some leftover papers and a tobacco pouch of her late husband’s, but he thanked her and declined. She asked if he would mind if she read the Bible aloud, and he didn’t mind. She read some of Leviticus, and some of Job, and this of Matthew: “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.” From the way she looked at him after reading these last words, he suspected she knew, or guessed, that he had been in prison.

It grew late. She yawned and told him, “I aint got a spare bed. You’d be welcome to mine if this weren’t jist the first night and I hardly know ye. Tomorrow night maybe we could jist sleep together.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m much obliged. I’d be jist fine on a pallet on the floor, and tomorrow I’ve got to be gittin me a soon start on back up home.”

But the next morning, before breakfast, after a whole day of not bothering him at all, the chill hit him again. It shook him, and kept on shaking him violently for nearly an hour, although the woman piled up every quilt she owned on top of him, after getting him up off his pallet and into her deep, warm featherbed. At first she blamed and berated herself, thinking the chill had been caused by his sleeping on the floor, but soon she saw it was something much more severe than any lack of hospitality could have been blamed for.

“I do believe you’ve got the swamp fever,” she told him, and then, after the chill had ceased and the burning fever had started, she was confirmed in her suspicion: “No doubt about it, you’ve got yoreself the bad malaria.” She became almost happy at the prospect of keeping him another day, or longer, tending his fever with towels soaked in cold well water, and later, when he began to sweat profusely, lovingly blotting it all up with rags. She sent the girl, Betsy, down the trail to the neighbors’ to see if she could borrow a little bit of whiskey, and the girl returned carrying the glass jar as if it held frankincense or myrrh.

Mary Jane put something into the whiskey; she refused to tell Nail what, but he, who could judge whiskey well enough to smell the feet of the boys who’d plowed the corn, knew the whiskey was adulterated. “I aint sposed to tell ye,” she insisted, “or it would take the spell off.” Whatever she put in (and I can only guess it probably was three drops of the blood of a black cat; Nail had observed a number of cats around the place) helped, although it tasted so awful he nearly gagged on it. He could not eat the fine dinner, or the leftovers at supper, but she forced him to drink some boneset tea, which is also very good for malaria, and to have another dose of the whiskey-with-cat’s-blood every two hours, or as often as he could stand it. And at bedtime she crawled in beside him. “Do what ye want,” she told him, but he had no strength to do anything, although he appreciated her closeness and softness and willingness.

Early the next morning, while she still slept, he awoke to find that enough of his strength had returned that he could take her if he wanted, but he had made his choice: whatever strength he had, he would use for the hike. He was fully dressed and ready to go before she woke up, blinking at the sight of him in her late husband’s clothes in the pale light of dawn, and he protested that he didn’t need any breakfast, but she begged him to stay and have a big plate of bacon and eggs and biscuits and jam, and the first real coffee he’d had in nearly a year.

And while he was pausing to eat before departure, the two children appeared and watched him eat, and Betsy asked him, “Don’t ye wanter be our daddy?”

He could not finish eating. “I don’t know how,” he said. “I aint got any experience in that line.”

“You’re a fool,” the woman said to him. “You don’t know a good thang when it’s lookin ye right squar in the face.”

“I’m a fool, I reckon,” he admitted.

“Have you got a woman waitin fer ye?” she asked.

“I shorely hope so,” he said, and thanked her for everything and several times protested her insistence that he stay.

When it became apparent that she could not persuade him to stay, she gave him one more thing of her late husband’s: a .22 rifle and a box of bullets for it. Nail had declined, but the woman had displayed her late husband’s entire arsenal: two shotguns, three rifles, even a handgun. She had offered him his pick, and he had decided on the .22 as most convenient. He would not be needing the bone air anymore, would he? she asked. “Could ye leave it for Eddie, when he grows up? I druther he learnt to use it than ary arn.”

Nail presented his bone air to Eddie. Eddie swapped him his dead father’s felt fedora for the coonskin cap.

She walked him as far as the trail and pointed the direction toward Ben Hur.

“I’m shore much obliged,” he said.

“Obliged enough to kiss me?” she asked.

And he took off the hat that had been her husband’s, and he kissed her on the mouth and put the hat back on and did not look back, knowing that she’d not be watching him disappear, because it’s real bad luck and even worse manners to watch somebody go out of sight.

Well, he told himself later on the trail, he wouldn’t never forget where Raspberry was, and if things didn’t work out between him and Viridis, he’d know where to find Mary Jane. Then he smiled and said to himself, But things is bound to work out between me and Viridis.

It was in 1880 that General Lewis (Lew) Wallace published a historical romance called
Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ,
which became one of the best-selling novels of all time, and popular even in the Ozarks, where somebody discovered it about 1895 and decided to name a community after it, or, rather, after its title character, a Roman-educated Jew who converts to Christianity and does good deeds. There was no post office of that name until about 1930, when the boundary between Pope and Newton counties was redrawn and Ben Hur became a part of Newton County. As late as 1963, Ben Hur was the last community in Arkansas to receive electricity, and even today the eastern approach to the town remains the last stretch of unpaved state highway in the Ozarks.

When Nail Chism passed through Ben Hur, he did it openly and even waved at a few people he encountered. He could have been taken for a foot traveler on his way to Moore or Tarlton, which is exactly what he was, carrying the deerskin and bearskin folded up under one arm, not wearing them in the heat, and the .22 rifle in the crook of his other arm was no more or less than any traveler might have carried.

He was determined to reach the Newton County line before nightfall, and, while there were no signs along the road indicating the county line, he seemed to know when he had reached his home county: his pace slackened, his step faltered, and he stopped, knowing he had reached the end of the day’s journey: just a little less than nine miles, which, in his weakened condition, had utterly exhausted him. For supper, he had only the fond recollection of his last supper at Mary Jane’s, and then he went to sleep on a pile of leaves beneath a rock shelter in a place called Hideout Hollow.

The next day he awakened once again with severe chills and knew then, conclusively, that he had the “two-day ague,” the form of malaria that recurs every other day. This third attack of the sequence of chills, fever, and sweating did not have the help of the medicine Mary Jane had given him; once again he was immobilized all day, and again he had the hallucination, or delirium, that he had reached Stay More and found a rock shelter in the glen of the waterfall prepared for him by Viridis. But this time when she appeared to him, she berated him for having slept with Mary Jane and told him he might as well go on back to Raspberry. On the next “good” day, in between the recurrent sick days, his first waking thought was that he ought to turn back to Raspberry and just stay there, if not forever at least until he was wholly recovered from the malaria.

But he went on. For the duration of his next good day, he made no attempt to keep hidden in the woods but walked on the cleared wagon trails that connected Ben Hur to Moore, and Moore to Tarlton, and Tarlton to Holt. I calculate that he covered another eleven miles or so along those wagon trails, stopping only once to pass the time of day with an inquisitive driver who was hauling a load of hay from his lower meadows to his barn and wanted to know who Nail was and where he was headed and what he thought of this terrible drought. Nail almost relished the chance to chat casually with a countryman, a fellow hillman, and he even told the man the truth: what his name was, where he had been, and where he was heading. “Shore, I’ve heared of ye,” the man acknowledged. “Matter of fact, I signed that thar petition to git ye off. Leastways I put my X on her.”

As Nail politely declined (three or four times) the man’s invitation to stay the night, the man asked, “Wal, air ye fixin to shoot Jedge Jerram?”

Nail laughed. “I’d shore lak to do it, but all I kin think about right now is gittin myself on up home.”

“Don’t take the right fork yonder,” the man suggested. “That’d take ye down Big Creek towards Mount Judy. Cut back over yon mountain and ye’ll come down to Tarlton. Stay More aint but about twelve, thirteen mile past thar. But you’d best jist come go home with me and stay all night.”

“I’m much obliged,” Nail said, and then, remembering his manners, counteroffered, “Why don’t ye jist go to Stay More with me?”

“Better not, I reckon,” the man said, and let him go, but called out from a distance, “I was you, I’d shore slay Jedge Jerram.”

For the next several miles Nail thought about that. He had been bent, all these days, only upon reaching the hills of Stay More, making contact with his folks, and seeing Viridis without a screen or a table separating them. He had not given much thought to revenge upon Sull Jerram. He hoped he would never even have to encounter the man; if he did, he didn’t intend to start anything; if Sull started something, Nail would be obliged to finish it. Certainly, he hated Sull, but he had not spent much time thinking about murdering him.

As that good day ended, somewhere short of Tarlton, Nail wished he had accepted the man’s offer to spend the night. He knew that the next day promised another attack of chills, fever, and sweats, and he’d have been better off at the man’s house; maybe the man had some quinine or something that Nail could have taken. But it was too late, he was miles past the man’s place, and he needed to find something for supper that would tide him over the bad day, and to find a sheltered place to spend it.

His weakness, his fatigue, his sense of being so close to home that he could almost smell the air of Stay More overwhelmed him, made him giddy, staggered him. Late in the afternoon he found himself, he thought, in a sheep pasture! Real sheep, or at least tangible ones: he called to them, a flock of less than a dozen, “Sheep! sheep! sheepsheepsheep!” and they came to him, and he sank his fingers into their regrowing fleece, although they were skittish, smelling the bearskin he still carried. He inspected them carefully; whoever owned them did not know much about the care of sheep and was not feeding them right or keeping them happy. Nail could not see any near farmstead or signs of a trail leading to one, and if the owner of the sheep had a sheepdog, the dog was busy elsewhere. Nail decided to spend the night with the sheep, and he did. For his supper, he shot a squirrel with the .22 and roasted it over coals. The sheep watched him and sniffed the smoke of his campfire and made puzzled sheep’s-faces.