The Choiring Of The Trees (2 page)

“That’s still one short,” Nail protested.

Mr. Burdell stopped grinning and looked tired and irritated. He said, “It don’t make no difference.”

“It aint legal,” Nail said. “Also, it aint legal to have that lady there.”

The warden turned to the woman and smiled. “Miss Monday,” he said. “Are you legal?”

She did not return his smile. She shook her head.

The warden glowered fiercely at Nail and said to him, “Okay, Chism, it’s cold in here and the sun’s fixin to go down, and it’s gittin real cold. Let’s git this over with. You want to say anything important? You been actin like you’re just out on a stroll to a picnic or something. You gonna be a real good boy and take this peaceful-like and easy, huh? Or do you want to start hollerin a bit and git it out of your system?”

Nail looked down at his hands. The trees were singing,
Stay more, stay more.
His hands were still bound together with cuffs. They would have to unlock the cuffs in order to strap his arms to the chair. In the instant between, he would reach inside his shirt for the razor-sharp dagger. He was conscious of the woman sketching his picture in her drawing-pad. With his head shaved smooth as an egg, he wasn’t much of a sight. The picture she’d drawn of Skip had made him look old and scared to death, although he was just sixteen and real brave for a colored boy. Nail wondered if the picture she was drawing of him was honest.

“Any last request?” Mr. Burdell asked him. “You aint got time for a cigarette.”

Nail inclined his head toward the woman. “Could I see the pitcher she’s drawin? That’s all.”

Mr. Burdell walked over and leaned down and spoke to Miss Monday. She said something to the warden. He returned and spoke to Nail: “She aint finished with it yet.”

“Could we jist wait jist a second, till she’s done?” Nail requested.

Mr. Burdell grunted, and hauled out his pocket watch and opened the gold cover of it. He stared at it for a time. He glanced at Miss Monday, and then at Nail. “Law says you got to be dead before the sun disappears,” he said. He walked back over to where Miss Monday was sitting, and stood behind her chair, watching her draw. He looked back and forth between her drawing and Nail’s face, as if he were comparing the two. Nail tried to look pleasant. He stared straight at Miss Monday, and from time to time she raised her head from her work and looked him right in the eye for a long moment. She was a pretty girl, even if she was cold as ice. Her eyes were sort of greenish…it was hard to tell in this light. Her skin was the palest, whitest flesh he’d ever seen. Red hair, green eyes, white skin: she was a picture herself.

While he posed in the last minutes of his life, he planned every move that he would make, trying to guess exactly what they would do while they were still able, before he took over. Fat Gabe would unlock the handcuffs. Short Leg would push him down into the chair. Fat Gabe would commence strapping his left arm while Short Leg would reach for the strap to do his right, and at that instant Nail would whip out the blade and slash it across Fat Gabe’s throat in one left-to-right motion that, continuing, would bring the point of the dagger in line with Short Leg’s heart, where Nail would thrust it forward, reaching in the same blink of an eye for Short Leg’s holster…

Oh stay more!
sang the trees, and Nail sang back,
I’m doing my best!
And apart from the singing the only sound in the cold, darkening room was the skritch-skritch of the woman’s charcoal pencil as she drew on and on.

Off

U
p on the lilting mountain far above the village is a farmplace so old the trees still sing of it, but nobody else does. The trees, a fat maple and a gangling walnut, left to grow for shade a hundred years ago when they were already old, about the time Nail Chism was born, don’t really talk each other’s language, but they sing a tune together, a kind of soughing ballad, a ditty maybe just of fragrances, leaf-smells in the sunlight that drop an octave in the moonlight, heard or smelled attentively by owls who roost there, and a nightingale, wondering at a treesong about people named Chism, whose farmplace it was when sheep still grazed the orchard grass, yarrow, and sweet-scented vernal, now grown to scrub, tangled with emerald vines and turquoise nettles. The leaning house behind the tilted white-paling gate was lived in for a few years just recently by some young people from another state who raised goats and marijuana, distant echoes of the sheep who had once grazed there and the corn whiskey moonlighted in the hollow down below.

Nail Chism helped his older brother Waymon and his kid brother Luther in the making of Chism’s Dew when the moon was right, but neither brother helped Nail in the keeping of the sheep, who were his alone, or even in the shearing of them, when the moon was right, in its waxing. There were a hundred and sixty acres on the Chism place: eighty downhill plowed to corn for the making of vernacular bourbon, eighty upland sown to timothy, meadow foxtail, white clover, and fescue, with a good bit of parsley mixed in among the yarrow and the sweet-scented vernal, to feed Nail’s flock, which numbered rarely less than a hundred or more than two hundred, including three or four rams to service.

The colors of the pasture grasses rose from deep jade and Kelly to light Nile and spring green, and each midsummer Nail sowed the bare spots of the fields with a bushel of mustardseed, the mustard adding sulphur to the diet of the sheep and adding yellow-green to the colors of the pasture, intensifying them in keeping with the heat of the sun and Nail’s keeping. The rape was sown in July and August for a fall feeding.

Rape, a primitive cabbage, Brassica cousin to mustard, is a purplish shade of green at its base, but the leaves are an intense phthalo green (pronounced without the
ph,
which reminds me of the one they used to tell about Nail in his schooldays: the new schoolmarm steered clear of questions that might get an argument out of him, and she wouldn’t protest when he told her right off that he didn’t intend to spell “taters” with a
p,
regardless of what the book says). Two pounds of rapeseed sown to the acre is enough; too much rape will cause the sheep to bloat. Some folks who didn’t like the word “rape” called it colza, but the rest of us never knew what they were talking about.

But it is the other kind of rape that dwells at the heart of this story, so it won’t do to confuse the issue by describing all that rape out in Nail’s pastures. He also grew a lot of turnips, because his sheep liked both the tops for forage and the pulverized roots as a main treat in the winter, and turnips never got anybody thrown into the penitentiary. The turnip top is a light, whitish green, not very intense, cool, a gentle shade that belies its pungent taste. Of course Nail never broadcast the turnip seeds but grew them separately in a fenced-off garden.

He grew a different kind of turnip for his mother to cook for greens with sowbelly, or mashed up like taters, or baked into a pie (yes, with sorghum sweetening, turnip pie is the best there is). In the Ozark Mountains garden truck is generally the womenfolk’s work, and some people raised an eyebrow at Nail Chism out yonder under his felt hat in the garden patch a-chopping weeds out of the ingerns, or onions, but most folks just said that was the
least
of his peculiarities, and better to let it go.

The sheep were his principal peculiarity. Not that sheep were so rare in the Ozarks (they weren’t at all in those days), but that a genuine shepherd was. If a man wanted to make a dollar or two every April from selling the wool, he’d keep a ewe (anybody who had one pronounced it “yo”) out behind the house where the dogs couldn’t get it. He wouldn’t think of eating it; nobody ate mutton, let alone lamb, in the Ozarks, where “meat” meant only pork, nothing else. (Pork can be salted and cured and preserved, but mutton cannot.) When the ewe got too old to be sheared, fourteen or so, and hadn’t died of natural old age, its owner would just let it go to rot or rust through neglect, and bury it, or take down the fence separating it from the dogs.

Nail Chism was the only man anybody knew, or even heard of, or read in the papers about, who kept a whole pastureful of sheep, and he spent most of his time, when he wasn’t tending the vegetable patch or helping his brothers with the whiskey still, living with the sheep and watching after them. We could hear him up there a mile off calling, “Sheep! sheep! sheepsheepsheep!” He knew everything there was to be known about sheep. He knew how to get the yolk just right—for anybody else, that meant the yellow part of an egg, but Nail would explain it was the soapy or greasy stuff on the fleece: too little yolk, and the sheep wasn’t getting the right mix of greens or else had been sired by an inferior ram, and the fleece would be dry and coarse; too much yolk, and twenty pounds of sheared fleece would weigh only four pounds after the first washing.

Every April, Nail Chism rented from Willis Ingledew’s livery a wagon, which he loaded with fleece to the sky, or at least to the lowest tree branches, and drove to Harrison, a week’s journey there and back, where he got the best dollar for his “crop.” Some folks wondered why Nail Chism even needed to join his brothers in the manufacture of illicit vernacular bourbon (those weren’t their words for the stuff) if he made a downright good living year in and year out from what he got at Harrison for his fleece. The answer, if you troubled to ask him, was simply that the Chisms had been making the best drinking-whiskey in the Ozarks ever since Nail’s grandaddy had come from Tennessee back in 18 and 39.

It was a family tradition, which Seth Chism had elevated to just about the acme of quality and repute and had instilled in his sons from the earliest they’d been able to plow the corn or fire the biler. Nail, Seth’s middle boy, had been made superintendent of the biler at the age of fourteen and had become a professional moonshiner long before the day he became a captive audience for a traveling peddler, name of Eli Willard, who was trying to unload a pair of Cotswold lambs he’d been swapped for out of something in Kentucky.

In those days the village reached its top size, the closest Stay More ever came to being a real town, with the Ingledews running a big three-floor general store as well as the post office and the gristmill, and getting competition from no fewer than three other general stores; there was almost a genuine Main Street of the kind associated with the motion picture called a western (although the surrounding countryside looked nothing at all like the stark badlands of the westerns: it was too green, had too many shades of green, was too lush and too uplifting, the hills rising steep and pastured and forested and bluffed), and along this Main Street there were two doctors’ offices and two dentists as well as Jim Tom Duckworth’s law office and at least three blacksmiths with the latest tripod gear-driven quickblast forges, and even, by the time this story really gets going good, a bonafide bank waiting to be robbed, and around the corner you’d find such things as Murrison’s sawmill and William Dill’s wagon factory, making some of the best horse-drawn vehicles still competing with the just-arrived automobile.

Eli Willard hadn’t yet discovered the automobile when he arrived in the thriving village with two Cotswolds in the back end of his wagon (a William Dill spring-platform model he’d bought at the factory his last trip to town, and reputedly driven to Connecticut and back without a broken wheel). Everyone in the Ozarks who did have sheep had a breed called American Merino, but the Cotswold, unbeknownst to Nail, who knew nothing about sheep at that point, is superior to the Merino for the production of wool.

The peddler Eli Willard was not in the business of purveying livestock; he just happened to have the two lambs this trip around, which actually was devoted to the selling of musical instruments, everything from parlor organs to Jew’s harps. For thirty-five cents Nail also bought from him a harmonica, a fitting accompaniment to sheep-raising. It was an M. Hohner Marine Band Tremolo Echo, and Nail taught himself how to make it tremble and to make it echo, when he wasn’t too busy teaching himself how to keep Cotswolds happy and healthy and reproductive. The trials and errors of this operation, had they been known to the other people of Stay More, would have made for all the jokes anyone would ever want to tell on Nail Chism, but he suffered his self-education in absolute privacy, and he practiced “Fisher’s Hornpipe” and “Billy in the Low Ground” and “Sook Pied, Sook Pied, Come an’ Git Yore Nubbins,” in complete seclusion from any ears except those of his sheep, who seemed to appreciate him and would sometimes blaat along.

What did he look like? He was very tall, the loftiest of the Chism brothers, at six feet three inches, and muscular without seeming strong, with a shock of very light brown hair, not quite blond as the newspapers would describe it, stuck up in what folks chose to call his sheeplick. He had blue eyes. The
Arkansas Gazette’s
drawing of him in December of 1914, by their staff artist Viridis Monday, does not fairly represent him, with that head shaved of its prematurely whitening locks (he was not yet twenty-eight) and that splendid physique looking frail beneath its prison clothes. Only the eyes in the Monday drawing seem to be the Nail Chism that most of us remembered: pale, gentle, comical, inquisitive, curious, and brighter-than-you’d-like-to-think: certainly not the eyes of a man on his way to the electric chair. Nail Chism was nobody’s fool. And yet there were those who liked to think that he was everybody’s fool.

One of those was his brother-in-law Sewell Jerram, of Jasper, the county seat, some ten miles north of Stay More. Sewell, or Sull as everybody but his mother pronounced it, had been born in Stay More but thought of himself as a town boy, although Jasper back then was already what it still is: the smallest county seat in the state of Arkansas, with just a few hundred people, and being a town boy in a small village didn’t leave Sull Jerram conspicuously different from a country boy; an outsider from, say, Little Rock wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart. But Sull Jerram didn’t know anything about farming, and the three brothers of Irene Chism, when Sull was courting her, got considerable amusement out of observing Sull’s ignorance of country ways and customs.