The Choiring Of The Trees (22 page)

There is a Y in the main road at Loafer’s Glory, and the left fork would have taken her into Madison County and toward Pettigrew, which Tom Fletcher had suggested as the terminus of her rail ride, but she took the right fork eastward toward Swain and Nail, a village named for the maternal grandfather of Viridis’ obsession. She did not know this then, but she reached it in midafternoon, and, inquiring the distance and direction to Stay More (for it was here she would have to turn north again), was told that it was only six miles, but six rough, crooked, uphill miles, and she wouldn’t be able to make it before dark.

She should have spent the night in Nail. Although the village had no hotel, or anything approximating one, any villager would have shown her hospitality and could probably have regaled her with stories about Jethro Nail, that maternal grandfather, from whom the hero of this story acquired a large measure of his sense of humor as well as his sense of injustice. But, so close to her destination, Viridis was eager to get on.

She would discover that Stay More had no hotel, or anything approximating one either…when she reached it. The reaching was hard. Of the whole journey from Clarksville, of her entire experience with bridle paths and trails and roads, those last six miles were the hardest. Indeed, that road from Nail to Stay More no longer exists today; it was the first road to be given back to the forest when the Ozark National Forest was set up; the southern entrance to, or egress from, Stay More has been closed off ever since. You could almost say that Viridis found a place you can no longer get to. Or, at least, that she used a path that can no longer be traversed. Or even that both place and path existed only in the creation of her fancy at that specific circumstance of time.

There were stretches where she had to get down and lead Rosabone. Places where Rosabone stumbled in the snow. Places where Viridis, down and walking, stumbled in the snow. Rosabone was getting very tired. It was growing dark, the forest canopy was obscuring what sky light there was, and Rosabone could not understand why they weren’t stopping if it was dark. Viridis tried to talk to her, but she was talking to herself, whistling in the dark, afraid. Once, as both she and Rosabone stood panting at the top of some defile they’d climbed, surrounded by huge boulders and enormous trees, she heard a noise, as of branches snapping, which caused her to fetch the revolver Tom Fletcher had lent her and make sure it was loaded, and to walk on for a while with the revolver in one hand and the mare’s reins in the other. She emerged into a clearing, dimly lit but still with enough light for her to witness the sudden spectacle of a huge bird swooping down and seizing a rabbit. She could not tell what sort of bird it was—eagle, hawk, falcon—but she could clearly identify the big white rabbit, who, strangely, she thought, made no protest or sound of any sort as the talons of the raptor lifted it off the ground and carried it ever higher out across the treetops and over the valley.

She moved on until she could see that valley, then stood looking into it for a very long while, resting, letting Rosabone rest. The last strips of the sunlit sky sank beyond the westward mountains. The moon rose, and it was full, and every star was there. The northern slopes of hills that she faced still were covered with snow, against which the black trunks and branches of trees made a vast and intricate tracery. The snow, in this light, seemed more blue than white, and everything was silent and still. One by one, far down below, people here and there lit their kerosene lanterns, and the pinpoints of light scattered across the valley forewarned Viridis of the number of people she must encounter before her mission would be accomplished. The whole scene reminded her of a village landscape at night as painted by van Gogh, although he had seen the moon and the stars far more passionately than she could now feel. “Well, Rosabone,” Viridis said, as she remounted the mare, “
that
is the end of our journey.”

It was downhill from there on. When she reached the village, it was full dark, but the great moon and a few kerosene lanterns in windows gave some illumination to the buildings along Stay More’s main street. Weeks after she had left Stay More, the next time the moon was full, I walked through the village one night attempting to see it as she had first laid eyes on it. Of course I knew each building, each house, and each store in a way that she did not: I recognized the dark, looming shape of Isaac Ingledew’s gristmill, closed then because the Chism moonshining operation had used up all the cornmeal; another large building, whose triangular gable rose three floors up, I knew, pretending to be Viridis, would be one of my objectives: Willis Ingledew’s General Store, where the men who would testify for Nail Chism congregated nearly every day, winter or summer; pretending to ride my horse on up the street, as she had, I passed between the two doctors’ clinics, on my left old Doc Plowright’s board-and-batten wooden shack with false front, he who had examined Rindy Whitter, and on my right across the street the new clinic of Plowright’s only competition, young Doc Colvin Swain, a Stay More boy, just out of his training in St. Louis. The next building up from Doc Swain’s was our principal business building, the ashlar stone Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company. I stood where Viridis had stopped her horse to stare at it, and then, as she had done, I let my eyes shift northward across the Right Prong Road (which she would take to get to my house as well as to the Chism place) to the only other general store on that stretch of main road, T.L. Jerram’s, run by Sull’s brother Tilbert. I must have stared at that one a little longer than she had, although then I couldn’t even guess that one day I would own it and live there and have the post office in it, and that even at this present time my granddaughter Sharon would be living there still.

Viridis looked at what wouldn’t become Latha Bourne’s General Store and Post Office until June of 1932; there were lights of kerosene lanterns burning within the two wings of the store that were living quarters, and she was tempted to stop there first, just to ask for directions. It would have been ironic to ask Tilbert Jerram for help in the beginning of what would become her fight against his brother. But she did not. She turned Rosabone around and began to ride slowly back down Main Street. There were lights burning at Doc Plowright’s, but I don’t blame her for having a sense, even then, that he wouldn’t be very sociable. Across the road she could see through the window of Doc Swain’s, where Colvin was sitting at a table peering through a microscope, and something about that—and the moonlit shingle hanging out front:
C.U. SWAIN, M.D
., doctor of human medicine—convinced her that he was a very busy young man who wouldn’t take kindly to an interruption. She only wanted to ask for directions.

Didn’t dogs bark at her? When I attempted to retrace her movements through the village and the surrounding countryside, weeks later in the moonlight, pretending to be her, some of the dogs pretended I was her too, and although they knew me they barked at me. Doc Swain’s great big old hound Galen nearly attacked me, and Doc Swain raised his head from the microscope and came outside and said, “Hush, Galen! Down, you dumb bawler! Oh, it’s
you,
Latha. What are you doin out this time o’ night?”

“Jist a-playin like I was
her,
” I said, and he knew who I meant. “And I was jist wonderin, did dogs bark at her that first night? Galen must’ve.”

“I reckon he did, but I never took no notice,” Doc Swain said.

If there was anyone who heard the village dogs barking at her and thought to go see who or what the dogs were barking at, it was probably that old lady who lived two doors down from Doc Swain, in the big fine two-story house directly across the road from Willis Ingledew’s store. This house had been built way back around the time of the War Between the States by old Jacob Ingledew, who died the year before I was born. He had been the founder of Stay More, he and his brother Noah, and right after that war he had served for a time as the governor of the whole state of Arkansas. Compared with Governor Hays, who wouldn’t pardon Nail Chism, he…but I’m digressing. This lady had been a friend of his wife’s when they lived in Little Rock at the governor’s mansion, and when Sarah Ingledew came back to Stay More she brought her friend with her, to stay. In this year of 1915 both Jacob and Sarah had been in the Stay More cemetery for going on fifteen years, but this lady, who inherited the house, still lived on there, and would continue to do so until sometime in the early twenties (I wasn’t living in Stay More the year of her death, so I don’t remember). To tell the honest truth, I never knew her name. Older folks who had known Sarah Ingledew just called her Sarah’s Friend, and in fact that’s all that you’ll find on her tombstone. If she ever told Viridis her name, and she must have, it’s not recorded.

But she came out on her front porch, wrapped in a thick afghan shawl, to see what the dogs were barking at…assuming the dogs were barking. That porch runs the whole length of the big house, and it has fancy jigsaw Gothic balusters running along the edge of it, hardly more than an arm’s length from the road, and the lady stood up against that porch rail and looked at that moonlit figure on horseback. Viridis stopped and turned Rosabone toward the lady and said, in that genteel Little Rock/Paris voice of hers, “Good evening, madam. This is Stay More, is it not? I’ve just arrived in town, and I’d like directions for finding the Right Prong Road that goes to the Chism farm.”

The lady smiled. “Which part of Little Rock are you from?” she asked.

Viridis was taken aback, to put it mildly, and her first thought was of some kind of conspiracy: somebody, maybe Nail himself, had gotten word to these people that Viridis was coming. But this woman was asking her
which part
of Little Rock she was from, as if there were divisions or distinctions, and—Viridis could not help noticing—this woman was not asking the question in the mode of expression or voice she would expect from a native of these parts.

“Why, the central part,” Viridis answered. “Why?”

“Louisiana Street, Center, Spring, or Broadway?” the old woman asked.

“West of that,” Viridis said. “Arch Street.”

“I guessed as much. That’s not exactly central. Well, as they say hereabouts, light down and hitch, rest your saddle. Come in and eat you some supper.”

“I’m just trying to find the Chism place,” Viridis said.

“You won’t find it in the dark, or even this fine moonlight. Are they expecting you? They won’t be able to give you a decent bed.”

“I don’t want to impose on you,” Viridis said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve room for your whole family, if you’d brought them with you. Well, maybe one of your brothers would have to sleep on the floor.”

Viridis was delighted. She accepted the offer of hospitality and discovered that the woman had the whole large house to herself, eleven rooms, simply but tastefully furnished. Behind the house was a small stable, where Rosabone was housed comfortably for the night.

The woman had just been starting to prepare her own supper at the time Viridis arrived, and it was no trouble for her to make a double serving of everything: roast pork, boiled potatoes in their skins with chopped parsley, fresh garden kale (it survives January’s freeze) cooked like spinach, and a light wheaten roll baked in a manner called Parker House. Viridis watched as these things came off of and out of a huge cast-iron and white enamel cookstove that gave off an additional fragrance of burning cedar logs, and of the sweet-potato pie they would have for dessert.

“Now,” said the old lady, “if I can just remember where the governor left that bottle of Alsace wine. Excuse me.” She disappeared upstairs, climbing the staircase with an agility that belied her years, more than eighty of them, Viridis guessed, and within a minute she returned, wiping the dust from, sure enough, a tall, narrow bottle of Gewürztraminer.

During the meal Viridis remarked, “You mentioned the governor. Were you speaking in the familiar sense of one’s husband, father, superior, or employer?”

The old woman smiled with amusement. “He was not my husband, but he was my ‘father,’ you could say. He was definitely my superior, and certainly my employer.” She paused to sip her wine, then added, “But Jacob Ingledew was also the governor.”

“Of Arkansas?” Viridis asked.

“Don’t the schools of Little Rock teach Arkansas history anymore?” the woman asked.

Viridis had actually taken mandatory Arkansas history in the eighth and ninth grades, but there had been so many governors and she couldn’t remember their names. She asked, with a smile, “Which part of Little Rock are
you
from?”

“East of Main,” the woman said. “Do you know the Pike mansion?”

“Of course!” Viridis replied. Her boss’s cousins, the Fletchers, owned the mansion that had been built by Albert Pike. “Did you live there?”

“No,” the woman said, smiling as if to excuse herself for misleading her guest, “but in the neighborhood, just a few doors to the east.”

The conversation died for a few moments before Viridis decided to ask, “What are you doing in Stay More?”

“I’ll be happy to tell you,” the woman said. “But first you must tell me: what are
you
doing in Stay More?”

These two Little Rock ladies, the one eighty-six, the other sixty years younger, stayed up talking until bedtime, and even beyond, telling each other their stories and their reasons, very good ones, for being in Stay More. The old woman certainly knew about the trial and conviction of Nail Chism, although she did not know enough of the facts of the case to have any opinion on Nail’s guilt or innocence. Summers she sat on her front porch and observed the men sitting on the storeporch across the way, and she knew which one was Nail, because he was taller than the others, younger than most of them, quieter, less inclined to joking although a quick audience for others’ jokes, but of course she was in no position to say whether he had been there at his usual time on that particular afternoon, which was just one more June day in a passage of rare ones. Yes, she knew of the Whitters; they were the “dregs” of Stay More society, and Dorinda’s oldest brother Ike had been the town’s ruffian and rowdy until the day the lynch mob disposed of him. The woman showed Viridis a number of plugged-up bullet holes in the walls of her front rooms, souvenirs of a raging gun battle Ike Whitter and his cronies had fought with the lynch mob, who had commandeered her house and required her to cower in a back room, frightened out of her wits, while every pane of glass in her house was shattered. This had happened ten years before, but the old woman still trembled sometimes in recollection of it.