The Choiring Of The Trees (62 page)

“Same as what’s in yourn,” I will say.

“Chicken’n
dumplins
?” he will ask.

“Yep,” I will say.

“My, my,” he will say, and will meditate upon the fact, like a suitor discovering that his competition is just as strong and handsome and rich as he is. “News shore travels fast, don’t it?” Then he will ask, “Wal, how air ye figgerin on gittin even one of them bowls up the mountain to ’em?”

“I got two hands, aint I?”

“Yeah, but it’s a fur ways off,” he will say. “Real fur off.”

I will begin wondering how he happens to know just how far off it is. His reference to “the woods where they are hidin” and “up the mountain” will indicate to me that he has a pretty good idea of where they are. I will wonder if the news traveling fast has told the whole world not only that Nail Chism has a hankering for some chicken and dumplings but also just where he’s hiding. But nobody else will know, except me and Doc Swain, who surely will not have told anybody.

It will suddenly dawn on me why, or rather how, Judge Lincoln Villines knows where Nail and Viridis are. But I will pretend ignorance and innocence and will tell him, “The reason I aint taken any of these bowls up there yet is that I’m not too sure just where it is they’re hiding.”

“You’re not?” he will say. “I was tole that you was the only one that knows.”

I will gesture vaguely northward. “I jist
think
it’s somewheres up yonder.”

He will correct my gesture, pointing properly eastward. “Naw, it’s over yonderways, up that mountain.”

“Could you show me?” I will ask.

“Well, I don’t want to go right up to the cave with ye, but I could lead ye part of the ways.”

“As far as where Sull Jerram was shot?” I will ask.

“Shore, I could take ye that—” Abruptly he will stop and change what he’s saying to: “Everbody knows whar that is, don’t they?”

“Nossir,” I will tell him. “Jist me and whoever it was kilt him.”

Will it matter, in the end, who killed Sewell Jerram? I think that what will matter, what will be of any interest to anybody, will be not so much the identity of the culprit as, rather, the motive. The reason that Sull Jerram was shot and killed was not because he was about to molest Viridis, not because he had raped and abused Dorinda Whitter, not because he had sent an innocent man to prison, but because he alone knew how much Lincoln Villines had to do with the bootlegging operation that had started the whole thing.

Arkansas has had a number of governors who were less than brilliant, less than capable, less than gubernatorial. George Washington Hays himself, despite his corruption, was not without intelligence, was a man who made many mistakes but was at least smart enough to realize when he had made a mistake. In this story Governor Hays will not last much longer, not as governor. In November he will announce that he will not seek reelection. He is intelligent enough to know that he would probably be defeated if he did seek it. Lincoln Villines was not intelligent enough to realize that he could never have been elected to the office even if he had not been stupid enough to get involved in a bootlegging operation.

A professor of political economy at the University of Arkansas, Charles Hillman Brough (the name rhymes with “tough”), will decide to campaign for the 1916 Democratic nomination for governor, opposing not just Hays, if he chooses to run again, but Hays’s entire machine, especially the Jeff Davis faction of the machine, which will appear so eager to hand the nomination to hillbilly Lincoln Villines…until suddenly Villines will not only be revealed to have a shady past but also be suspected of, and then indicted for, murdering a fellow judge, Sewell Jerram, who had threatened to expose that shady past.

The scandal will shake the Democratic Party but not to the extent of preventing its nominee, Brough, from swamping the Republican and Socialist nominees in the general election, by almost a hundred thousand votes.

As one of his last acts in office, as the very last of a long string of sometimes questionable pardons, Governor Hays will grant a pardon to Lincoln Villines, then under a relatively light sentence of ten years, a Newton County jury having convicted him not of murder, reasoning that it isn’t murder to do away with a bad man, but of “voluntary manslaughter,” as the foreman attempted to classify it.

Governor Hays in retirement will keep a law office in Little Rock and will publish a number of articles in national publications, arguing his continued advocacy of capital punishment as the only alternative to mob violence. During Prohibition and the Jazz Age he will remain a staunch supporter of Alfred Smith as the Democrats’ candidate for president, because, he will point out, “It was the Republican Party that tried to force the social equality of the Negro upon the Aryan people of the South.” But Hays will not live to see Smith win Arkansas while losing most of the South and the election. Hays will die as another advocate of Aryan supremacy, an Austrian named Schicklgruber, is rising to power in Germany.

Governor Brough, an erudite and persuasive man bent upon prison reform and better roads and education, will as one of his first acts of office consider extending a pardon to Nail Chism, unconditional except for one little condition: that Nail Chism come to Little Rock, give himself up directly to the governor, and receive his pardon. That offer will be something for Nail to think about.

But there will be many other things for Nail to think about before then. At one point he will have to decide whether or not he and his lady should relinquish their sylvan sanctuary and move back to society. It will become clear, after a while, that nobody is really trying to find them. Nearly everybody will know that they are up there, somewhere, high on Ledbetter Mountain in a cave or cavern near a spectacular waterfall. They will know that I have made countless trips up there myself, each time carrying a bowl of chicken and dumplings, and I myself will have heard of the men on Ingledew’s storeporch making bets on which will happen first: the remaining chicken and dumplings will spoil, or Nail will grow tired of them. And sure enough, those wagering on the former contingency will be victorious.

What will bring Nail out of hiding, eventually, will not be my continued reassurance that nobody, especially not the law, or what is left of the law in Newton County, is actively searching for him, but Doc Swain’s sorrowful announcement to him that his father has taken a turn for the worse. On one of his visits, a week or so after Nail’s return, Doc Swain will examine Nail and pronounce him almost recovered from his malaria, and then will sadly tell him that his father is dying.

That will bring Nail home.

He will never again return to the cave, except, oh, years later on a kind of nostalgic pilgrimage to it, he and Viridis will take their little boy to see the spot where the boy was conceived, although of course they won’t try to explain to a kid that young what “conception” means. And I will be getting far ahead of my story.

[Although my story, that is, the story of my own life, will tend to fade off, far off from here. I will not immediately, or soon, honor my assent to Every’s request; for one thing, my mother will constantly remind me that he cannot be my beau, for two reasons: he’s a cousin, even if twice removed, and the Dills are the lowest of the low on the Stay More social ladder, such as it is. Raymond Ingledew, youngest son of banker John Ingledew, will begin to take notice of me, or take a letch for me (is there a difference?), and my mother will think Raymond makes a far more eligible beau, but the story of all of that, and what will happen between Every and Raymond, will have to wait until you, dear reader, can tell it.]

Nail will attend his father in his last hours. Nail will move back into his father’s house, and he and Viridis will sleep there, not together of course, because even though everybody will assume that Nail and Viridis have been sleeping together in the cave, it would be improper and unseemly, not to mention immoral, for an unmarried couple to sleep in the same bed in the house of decent folks. And besides all that, it would not be nice for a man to have relations with his girlfriend while his father is dying. Seth Chism will hang on for nearly a week after Nail moves home, and Nail will sleep in his old bed, and his brother Luther will be sent to Waymon’s house so that Viridis can have Luther’s bed. And everything will be proper while Seth is dying.

When Seth dies (happy, Doc Swain assures everybody), Nancy, Seth’s widow, will move in with her oldest son Waymon, who lives down the trail a ways in the old McCoy place with his wife Faye, and young Luther, her least boy, still a teenager, will go with her, leaving the old Chism place entirely to Nail and to Viridis, and even though they will not be married yet, it will be nobody’s business whether they resume sleeping together. It will be their house. Nancy will deed that house and eighty acres to her son Nail, who will add to it the forty acres of his own that had been a pasture for sheep. Now he will have a hundred and twenty acres on which to raise sheep…if he cares to.

Will he care to? One of the biggest things he will have to think about is not whether he wants to raise sheep again, because that is really all he honestly wants to do, but whether he ought to ask Viridis if she’d mind if he resumed shepherding. He will brood about asking her this question much longer than he will later brood about asking her the other question: whether or not she might be interested in getting married to him.

He should not need to brood so; she will understand him. She will know him through and through, what makes him tick, what winds him up and makes his pendulum swing, and whether he is midnight or high noon despite his hands being the same at both times. Viridis will almost want to ask him herself, Aren’t you thinking about getting some more sheep? but she will decide to wait, because she will know he is.

And he will start a new flock. Not right then, because late summer isn’t the best time, but soon. Within a year he’ll have his hundred and twenty acres up to capacity with sheep, more than he’s ever had before, and Viridis will set some tongues to wagging because she’ll do something that most wives hereabouts (although she won’t be a wife yet) never do: she’ll help with the stock. She’ll learn the ways of sheep. She’ll become, for heaven’s sake, a
shepherdess.

Won’t that be pastoral? I will come across them once, on my rambles. I’ll ramble a lot. The day that Dorinda Whitter elopes with Virge Tuttle and is taken by him back to Pettigrew to live, I’ll go up on the hill to shut down our playhouse. Not just shut it down but destroy it, I guess. Then I’ll keep on walking until I happen to find myself in Nail’s sheep pastures, and I’ll catch sight of them: Nail and Viridis, sitting on the hillside, under a singing hickory, surrounded by grazing sheep. Nail will be playing his harmonica to the hickory’s singing. Viridis will have her sketchbook in her lap, drawing, I’ll suppose, a pastoral landscape.

They will catch sight of me and wave. That ought to be my last picture in this story, the two of them there on that hillside, waving good-bye together, waving to signal that the story is over, that everything’s fine, that I can go my way and they can go theirs, that the sheep will be happy and grazing, that all’ll be right with the world.

But they will also be waving hello as well as good-bye, and I will go on up and visit with them for a little bit. It will bother me to be that close to Nail, and I guess I’ll blush. I’ll still be in love with him. I’ll still have dreams, waking and sleeping, about what it would’ve been like if I’d, that morning with him in the cave, if only I’d…

“Could I see your picture?” I’ll ask Viridis, and she’ll show it to me, the landscape she’s working on. When the time will come that Governor Brough will invite Nail to come to Little Rock and give himself up and receive the governor’s pardon, and Viridis of course will go with him (and the two of them will conspire to get Ernest Bodenhammer a Brough pardon too), she will have a whole bunch of pictures to take with her, not just the very best landscape sketches ready to be framed but a number of canvases too: oil paintings of the Stay More countryside and of the people. She will not by any means be the first to have depicted the village and its inhabitants on canvas, nor by any means will she be the last, but to me she will always be the one whose pictures never fail to capture my eyes and my heart, both.

Viridis Monday will always be the one, and I’ll get through a lot of the rough places of my life just by thinking of her, and wishing I were like her, and trying to be like her, and only sometimes envying her for having taken Nail. I’ll never find a man to save. Not like she saved him. But I’ll keep my eyes open.

Far off, the day before yesterday, I will attend Dorinda Whitter Tuttle’s funeral. My grandson Vernon will drive me the fifty-three miles to Pettigrew for it. Pettigrew, to my sorrow, will be all run down from its former glory as the terminus of the Frisco Railroad, which will have been gone from it for some fifty years. Pettigrew will be just a wide place in the road, both sides of the road clotted with junked automobiles: a vast junkyard. At least it’s not in Newton County, but over the line in Madison County. Vernon will not stay for the funeral; he will have business in Fayetteville. Rindy’s daughter Latha will have agreed to drive me home afterward; I will be uncomfortable, not so much because Rindy has named her daughter after me and it will be awkward having two Lathas in the same car, as because Latha Tuttle will be seventy years old herself and only a little bit better a driver than me, and I will not be able to drive at all. At least, I will be somewhat relieved to discover that Latha Tuttle at seventy will have no resemblance to myself at seventy. We will not talk an awful lot. She will not be particularly grieving or mournful; she will have been living in Russellville, a widow herself, for many years largely out of touch with her mother, especially in the last years, when Rindy’s body was consumed by cancer. Nor will Latha Tuttle have much interest in the old lady she was named after, and even less interest in the remains of the hometown of that lady. Strangely, it will be her first visit to Stay More and her last. She will be eager to deposit me at my home and get on back to her own. I’ll have time for just one question: “Did your mother ever say anything about Nail Chism to you?” Latha Tuttle will ask me to repeat the name a couple of times; her hearing will be very impaired.