The Choiring Of The Trees (50 page)

But she didn’t, although I waited up past bedtime. Maybe, I thought, her suspicion might have been right: maybe Nail was hiding out at the Chism place and had made his folks promise not to tell anyone, but once Viridis had gone up there, they couldn’t keep it from her. And now, I thought, as I lay in bed trying to sleep, they are in each other’s arms at last.

The next morning I worked for only an hour in the garden before heading for my waterfall to bathe. The mullein stalk named Viridis was standing proud and tall. But the one named Nail still drooped to the ground. I took a real quick shower bath, returned to the house and had a quick breakfast, and was sitting on the front porch of our cabin when Viridis rode up on Rosabone.

“He wasn’t there,” she said.

“I know,” was all I could say. But I
did
know, from the mullein stalk, that he had not come back to Stay More.

The Chisms of course had been so delighted with her visit that they hadn’t easily let go of her. She’d had to stay with them through supper, and until it was scarcely light enough to see her way home, and by then she had been too tired to remember her promise to stop by my house. She was sorry. I said that was okay, that I was sorry she hadn’t found Nail.

“You don’t suppose,” she started again with those familiar words that sounded sort of desperate, “that he could be somewhere up in the mountains or lost hollows, hiding out?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t break the magic and tell her about that mullein stalk named Nail, or it would pop right up and pretend he wasn’t lost when he actually was.

“You don’t suppose,” she asked, “that he might not even want his own parents to know that he has come back?”

“Viridis,” I said, with a little exasperation, “I know that Nail’s not anywhere around Stay More.”

“How can you be so certain?” she said, not really asking it so much as accusing me for my cocksure conviction.

“I just know,” I declared. “Believe me.” I nearly added, by way of consolation, I’ll tell you the minute I see the mullein straighten up again. But you can’t tell anyone about the mullein.

She said, “Latha, Nail told me that you could tell me where he would be hiding. Do you know where it is? Would you show me?”

Then I remembered what I’d written to him in that letter about the lost glade, or glen, of the high waterfall, way back up on the mountain beyond his upper sheep pasture. I was flattered that my telling him about it would have made him want to use it as a hiding-place. For a moment, even, I wondered if the range of my mullein’s magic extended that far into the wilderness. Could it be that my mullein didn’t know he was already there? But no: the mullein will tell you if something or someone is lost even if it or they are a thousand miles away. “Sure, I could show you,” I said, “but I don’t think you’ll find him there.”

“Can we go there?” she asked, and that note of desperation still gave an edge to her question. She observed, correctly, that I was just sitting in the rocker on the porch, not doing anything, and she asked, “Are you free to go right now?”

I looked around as if somebody might try to detain me, or as if to see if anybody was spying on us, but Viridis and I seemed to have the morning all to ourselves. “Let’s go,” I said.

And we went. Rouser tried to follow and I told him to stay home but Viridis said he could go with us, so we let him trot along after Rosabone as she carried the two of us up the road toward the Chism place.

But somebody
was
spying on us. I should have guessed, I should have been able to put myself inside of Sull Jerram’s crooked mind and figure out that if he and his courthouse gang were determined to keep Nail from returning, or to capture him as soon as he showed up and turn him back over to the authorities in Little Rock, they’d likely post a watch on Viridis and trail every move she made. By now everyone knew she was here. By now Sheriff Duster Snow had had plenty of time to tell his deputies to put Viridis under surveillance. Two deputies, we later learned, had taken up residence in Tilbert Jerram’s General Store, from which they could watch any comings or goings from the old woman’s house, and it was one of these deputies who was now following us, on his horse, as we rode Rosabone in the direction of what had once been Nail’s sheep pastures. Rouser caught wind of him and growled a little bit to attract my attention. I looked over my shoulder and saw the man on his horse, a good distance behind us. “Viridis,” I said, “we’re being followed.”

She stopped and turned Rosabone. When she stopped, so did the distant rider. “Do you know who he is?” she asked.

I couldn’t see him well enough to recognize him or even to know for sure that he was one of Snow’s deputies. “No, but I reckon he’s one of the law,” I said.

“We’ll have to lose him,” she declared. “Where can we go to shake him off?”

“That way,” I directed her, not pointing but just nodding my head slightly in the direction of a byroad that diverged from the Chisms’ lane and dropped down toward Butterchurn Holler. We rode Rosabone along the Butterchurn Holler trail for a mile, with the deputy still coming along behind us, hanging back but definitely following us. I knew there was a sharp bend ahead in the trail, and I told Viridis, “When we reach that big hickory up ahead, right past it let’s cut quick into the woods.”

She spoke over her shoulder: “I’m afraid I don’t know a hickory from an elm. You’ll have to say when.”

I told her when. We left the road and plunged into the deep woods that rose up the north side of Butterchurn Holler. The climb was steep, and we both dismounted and led Rosabone up to the top of the ridge, where we paused and waited for fifteen or twenty minutes to see if the deputy had discovered which way we had gone. But there was no further sign of him. He must have followed the Butterchurn Holler trail onward. We remounted Rosabone and rode across the ridge until we could double back and regain the Chism lane and cross it into Nail’s sheep pastures. As we rode across the pasture, I watched carefully in every direction for signs of any other deputy or spy.

The pasture rose, rolling, through the high weeds and brush that had taken over the place since Nail’s sheep had died. The Chisms ought to have bought a few sheep or goats just to graze it and keep it from going back to the wild, or at least they should have mowed it for hay. “What is all this ferny stuff?” Viridis asked, and I explained that it was yarrow, which Nail had planted for his sheep to supplement their diet; but it had grown tall and its leaves, a grayish shade of green, were rank. “Yarrow’s a pretty name for a plant,” she said, and I told her that some women and girls used yarrow as the main ingredient in a love medicine. “Love medicine?” Viridis laughed, and I had to explain to her how you could concoct beverages that had the power to influence the man of your choice.

She didn’t take me very seriously. Then as we went on she asked me to identify other weeds and grasses, and I told her the names of all the pretty ones: chicory and butterfly weed, coreopsis and oldfield toadflax. “Really? Is it really called oldfield toadflax?” she asked, and I said that was what I’d always known it to be called.

Then we were drawn into that uppermost corner of the field, where it nestles against the side of the mountain, lined on two sides by thick, close hardwoods that seem to make a cul-de-sac in the corner but actually open into an old trail. But I didn’t direct Viridis toward that trail opening, just yet. “Let’s wait here a bit,” I suggested, and dismounted from Rosabone. “You just sit there on her for a while, and I’m gonna check to make sure nobody’s watching you.”

Viridis did as I told her, and I crept over behind the tree line at the edge of the field and followed it for a good ways back along the slope of the pasture, with Rouser at my heels. I moved from tree to tree, keeping myself hidden and looking out across the field to catch sight of anyone else. But there was no one. We were alone up there. “Smell anybody?” I asked Rouser, and he planted himself and raised his nose into the air as if he understood my question. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had shaken his head in reply, but he just gave me a blank, dumb, doggy look as if to say no, he didn’t smell anybody. I went back to Viridis and motioned for her to follow me, and we crossed the tree line and entered the deep woods.

There had been some logging activity not too long ago in this part of the woods, which had all second-or third-growth trees, not very tall, and thin. The earth here was still gouged by wheel ruts from the heavy-laden lumber wagons. But after following the main logging-trail for less than a mile, we found ourselves in a holler that had no path except what remained of some ancient passage, perhaps of Indians. The deeper we got into this holler, the taller the trees stood, until we were in rare virginal woodland: towering stands of oak, ash, and hickory, hung with huge grapevines and blackjack vines that had given up trying to climb the trees and made the place look like a jungle. Either these trees were too hard for the loggers to get at or whoever owned the land had not permitted logging. I didn’t know who owned the land. Not the Chisms, whose acres we had left far down below.

If these virgin trees were singing, they sang only with fragrance, not with sound. It was eerily quiet and still in this forest, a silence matching the darkness: although it was well past midmorning and the sun was high in the sky, the canopy of the forest shaded everything except a random patch of sunlight here and there.

A small branch meandered through the holler, and its gentle gurgling was the only sound besides the clop of Rosabone’s hooves on an occasional slab of chert. The branch was the runoff of the falls, which were still out of earshot. Along the banks of the branch grew wildflowers, and Viridis asked me to name them for her: my voice seemed to have an echo, nearly a boom in the silence, as I pronounced, “Bee Balm, Mallow, Lady Slipper, Fireweed…” We were deep into a rich, woodsy fragrance that was only partly flowers; the rest was moss and leaf mold and fern and the silent singing of the trees. I mentioned to Viridis in passing that the lady slipper’s roots are used in concocting one of the most powerful love medicines ever known, a surefire aphrodisiac…although I didn’t know that word, not then. “It makes a body right warm and lusting” was the way I put it, blushing furiously in the effort.

It was almost eleven o’clock when we came to the glade, or glen, which was illuminated by the full sun: the northeast end of the holler terminated in cliffs, and over the lowest ridge of the bluff spilled the waterfall, a white square fifteen feet high, dazzling in the sunlight. On both sides of the waterfall the cliff was deeply undercut into caverns, sunless grottoes in which Indians once had lived and which still contained the shattered relics of their habitation: bits of woven stuff, shards of pottery, bones. Viridis was entranced. Rouser was having a field day, sniffing around.

“Here we are,” I declared.

“Nail?” she softly called, but of course there was no answer. She tested the water of the falls with her hand, and so did I; it was much, much colder than my shower bath falls. “Is it safe to drink?” she asked. We were both very thirsty from our ride and hike. Rosabone had not waited for my answer but was already lowering her head to drink from the deep, blue pool at the base of the falls.

“It’s springwater,” I said. We knelt and cupped our hands to drink. The water was delicious: cold and fresh and pure. There wasn’t even a minnow swimming in it, nor a waterbug. A flitting dragonfly was the only creature besides us around the pool. But in the mud at the edge there were some tracks, of more than one animal. I wasn’t very good at recognizing animal tracks, and some of these I’d never seen before. Rouser was practically rooting his snout in the tracks and holding his tail very still, which he does when he’s trying to think.

Viridis didn’t seem to notice the tracks, and I wasn’t going to scare her with the thought that we might be surrounded by wolves, bears, or panthers, not to mention gowrows, jimplicutes, and snawfusses. The latter three were just as real to me as the former three, but I had never seen any of them, although I’d heard wolves howling at night far across the ridges.

We were sitting now on the log of a fallen tree, while Rosabone with her reins loose wandered around the pool and Rouser went off out of sight to pursue the trail of one of the animals. “It’s so peaceful here,” Viridis observed, smiling and taking a deep breath as if the air were peaceful too.

“This would be a perfect place for Nail to hide if he—” Her voice caught, she choked, then sobbed once, loudly, and I thought sure she was going to cry, but she stopped herself and sniffled, using her wrist to rub away whatever had been ready to run from her eyes or nose. Then sadly she said, “Maybe he’ll never see it.”

“He’s already seen it,” I said. “He knows every inch of this mountain.” I thought of what I’d said to him in my letter: “I didn’t stay up there very long, but while I was there I thought of you, a lot, and I had a strange vision as if I could see you just living and dwelling in that hidden glade.” I told Viridis, “If he’s alive, and if he goes anywhere, he’ll come here. He might even be on his way here right this minute.”

We waited. It was almost as if we’d been told he’d come at high noon and we had just a few minutes to wait for him. Meanwhile Viridis asked me to identify everything that I could see from where I was sitting: she wanted to learn the names of everything visible that could be named. There were some ferns growing around the pool that were so uncommon I didn’t know their name, and there was even a flower, some kind of twayblade, that I couldn’t identify, but I told her everything I knew in that green glen.

And she knew things I didn’t, that every shade of that green had a name, some shades of green I’d never heard of before, that she pointed out to me: cinnabar, Aubusson, smaragd, cobalt, Hooker’s, palmetto, Véronèse, teal, gamboge, shades of green that only an artist would know but that would come in handy if you wanted to remember the difference between a frond of fern and a bough of cedar. Cinnabar is a very reddish green, and I didn’t even know that green could be red, its complement, until Viridis pointed it out to me.