The Choiring Of The Trees (51 page)

We were learning things from each other. But it was past noon now, and we were both hungry for dinner, and I hadn’t brought my .22 with me to shoot something to eat, and even if Rouser had trotted back with a possum in his mouth I wouldn’t have known how to cook it. It would be way past dinnertime before we got back home, and we’d be starved.

A blue lizard frightened Viridis into leaving the place. It was just a harmless little skink that crawled out from under a rock and flicked its tongue at her, but maybe she had never seen a lizard before: she jumped up with a squeal of terror and ran several feet before stopping. Of course by then she’d scared the daylights out of the poor skink, who’d slunk back to his hidey hole. “It was just a lizard,” I said. “They won’t bite.”

“Up close he looked like a small dragon,” she said, recovering herself, and then, apologetically, “Well, we’d better go, don’t you think?”

I nodded and called for Rouser. He came back from wherever he’d been tracking whatever, and Viridis took Rosabone’s reins and said, “I wish there were some way I could let him know that I was here, in case he comes.”

“Well,” I said. I began picking up small rocks, and I arranged them beside the pool of the falls into a large letter V. “If he sees that, he’ll know it stands for you.”

Viridis studied my handiwork, and then she bent to gather some other stones and make beside the V another letter, a large L.

I was flattered, but I protested, “He won’t know what that stands for.”

“If he doesn’t,” she said, “let him think it stands for love.”

I blushed red.

Each morning thereafter Viridis went to that remote glen of the waterfall, but without me. I understood. Sometimes I guess I overstood: I let my imagination run away with me in picturing the first meeting between Viridis and Nail, the first time they’d ever been allowed to touch without someone watching them. What kind of touch would it be? They sure wouldn’t simply shake hands. And it would probably be more than a hug. It would probably be more than even my imagination could guess, and I understood why Viridis did not invite me to go back with her to that glen. But there was another reason: she could ride Rosabone a lot easier and swifter without me behind. She had to elude those deputies who watched her every move from their lookout at Tilbert Jerram’s store. Both of those deputies had good horses, but they weren’t jumpers like Rosabone, and that mare would really give them chase. Viridis would point her west, or north, or south, or any direction except her northeastward destination, and then lead those poor deputies on a pursuit that would take them all over the Stay More countryside before they quit and realized they had long since lost her. Without me riding behind, Rosabone could jump pretty near anything that stood in her way: fallen trees and fences and creeks and brush piles that would impede or completely stop those men trying to follow her. Not once did those deputies come anywhere near discovering Viridis’ actual destination in the green glen of the waterfall.

Viridis would go on alone into the glen after shaking off her pursuers. It scared her a good bit, going alone through that dark forest to that place where possibly fiercer creatures than blue lizards dwelt. On the forest path once, Rosabone shied and reared up and nearly threw Viridis: there was a copperhead in the path, and those snakes are sure enough a lot less harmless than lizards: a copperhead’s bite can kill you.

When she got to the glen, Viridis would give herself and Rosabone a good long drink from the pool and then just hang around awhile, looking for signs that Nail or any other man had been there. Each time she went there she would take something and leave it, in the largest cavern beside the falls, like a bird building a nest: she would pack in a blanket one day, another blanket the next day, and eventually all of the things she had meant to leave under the sycamore tree behind the penitentiary: the hunting knife, the harmonica, the pocketknife with can opener attachment, and the few cans of corned beef and beans and such, as well as the compass, the pocket watch, soap, salt and pepper, and a few yards of mosquito netting (the mosquitoes were getting bad). On each trip she would check carefully to see if any of these items had been used or even touched. Disappointed, she would just sit for an hour or so listening to the trees, and waiting, before heading home.

Only one item that she had intended to leave for Nail and Ernest she did not place in the cavern but carried with her at all times: the Smith
&
Wesson revolver. Having the gun with her allayed the terror of encountering a panther, bear, or wolf. Against a pack of wolves the gun wouldn’t be much help, but it was better than nothing. She kept it in a small saddlebag attached to the back of Rosabone’s jumping-saddle, where she also sometimes carried a sandwich, in case she was gone past dinnertime.

Returning from the falls, she would be just as careful as she had been going to them, to make sure that she wasn’t watched or her route discovered. She would take a circuitous path that brought her out north of Nail’s sheep pastures, and then she would come back across those pastures to the Chism house and stop to say hello and perhaps make sure that he hadn’t shown up there.

On one of these visits to the Chism house she discovered that Seth Chism was in pretty bad shape. Nail’s father had been ailing for quite some time, and now it appeared that he might not survive. Doc Plowright had been to see him, but now the Chisms had sent for young Doc Swain, who was there when Viridis arrived and who later talked to her alone back in town.

“They call it heart dropsy,” Doc Swain said to her. “Leastways, that’s what…my colleague across the road yonder calls it.” He gestured toward Doc Plowright’s clinic. “I reckon that’s what he’s always heared it called, and he keeps on callin it that even though he must know it’s actual a pericarditis. Or maybe he don’t know that. Anyhow, ole Seth’s heart is shore to fail. Now, I reckon if Nail was to show up, he could get better. But if he don’t, his heart is bound to fail.”

“Mine is bound to fail too,” she said.

Doc Swain, who wasn’t any older than she was, looked at her with compassion. “It better not,” he said gently. “There aint nothin I could give ye for your heart.”

The old woman had a visitor that night. Or maybe he meant to visit Viridis, but the way he acted, it was the old woman he had driven all the way from Jasper to see. Judge Lincoln Villines drove the car himself, and he came alone. He must have left early in the afternoon, to drive that car over all the ridges and through all the creeks between Jasper and Stay More. He arrived just a bit too late for supper. The old woman and Viridis were taking their coffee out on the porch when he pulled into the yard. Of course they recognized him from the previous time he’d been on that porch: it was almost as if those five or six months had not intervened since he had last stood there in the company of the sheriff and the county judge; it was almost as if they could still hear him snapping at the latter, “Shut yore fool mouth, Sull! Aint you done made enough trouble already? Jist shut up, afore ye go and make it worse!”

But now he spoke mildly, although the subject of his speaking had not changed: “Ladies, good evenin and howdy. I trust ye aint had no trouble lately from…my colleague, Jedge Jerram?”

“He knows better than to show himself in my sight again,” the old woman said.

Lincoln Villines smiled at her and waited to see if she would offer him a chair. She did not. He turned to Viridis. “And you, young lady? Has he given you ary bad time?”

“Not directly,” Viridis said. “I haven’t seen him. But his deputies are trying to stalk every move I make.”

The circuit judge smiled. “Them is Sherf Snow’s deppities, ma’am. They don’t work for Sull.”

“Does it matter?” Viridis said testily. “Aren’t all of you in cahoots together?”

The judge coughed. “That aint a pretty color to put on it,” he said. “I don’t have no sympathy nor friendship with the sherf. And I don’t have no feller-feelin with Sull Jerram neither.”

“You’re both judges,” Viridis pointed out.

“He aint no
judicial
jedge, ma’am. Don’t ye know that? He’s jist a
administrative
jedge.” Villines turned to the old woman. “Iffen ye’d be so kind as to offer me a cheer, I’d set and explain the difference to y’uns.”

“We know the difference,” the old woman said. “But pull you up a cheer and set, if you’ve a mind to.”

He sat. He rubbed his hands together as if washing them. He started to spit over the porch rail but decided not to. “Fairly cool for this time of June, aint it?” he observed, but neither of the women commented. Then he said, “No, I’m sorry to say it, but Sull Jerram don’t know beans about law. Iffen he’d of knowed the first thing about the law, none of this mess would have started nohow.” When that brought no comment either, he addressed a conversational question to Viridis: “How’s ever little thing at the
Gazette
and all, these days?”

“I’m no longer with the
Gazette
,” Viridis informed him.

“Is that a fack?” he said. “Wal, I do declare. Times change, don’t they. You aint a reporter no more?”

“I never was a reporter,” she said. “Just an illustrator.”

“I see,” he said, uncertainly. “George Hays told me you was a reporter.”

“There are many things that Governor Hays does not understand.”

“Wal, I don’t make no promises, but I do believe that if I was to be elected governor, I couldn’t do no better.”

Both women attempted to figure that one out. They looked at each other. Had Lincoln Villines just intimated that he intended to run for governor, or hadn’t he? Viridis had heard the rumors, that the so-called Jeff Davis faction of the Democratic Party, named after a demagogue who had served as governor early in the century, was touting Lincoln Villines as their likely candidate in the event that George Hays chose not to seek reelection. Villines’ only qualification for the nomination, apparently, was that like Jeff Davis he was an Ozarks mountaineer. “Are you going to run for governor?” Viridis asked him. “Has Hays decided not to seek reelection?”

“I was hopin you could tell me that one,” the judge said. “I was hopin maybe you’d heard if George is made up his mind yit.”

“There are rumors he won’t run,” Viridis said. “Just rumors.”

“Do Little Rock folks expect him to?”

Even if she could answer that, why should she? She owed no favors, of information or anything else, to this man. She shrugged her shoulders. “He probably won’t run,” she declared, and realized that she was encouraging the judge, for some motive she didn’t yet understand herself.

“Is that right? Wal, I suspicioned it myself, although George hasn’t told me. You’d think he’d tell me. We’re real good friends from way back. You’d think that I’d be the first person he’d tell when he makes up his mind, on account of several fellers have told me that I’d be first choice to step in and take his place if he didn’t run.” Judge Villines rambled on, talking aloud to himself more than to the two ladies. The two ladies smiled at each other. Neither of them could guess the real motive of the man’s visit, and they waited patiently for him to reveal it. The sun was on its way down. Judge Villines squinted at it as it sank behind the mountain that walled in Stay More on the west.

Finally he did spit. The old woman knew, as she would later explain to Viridis, that ordinarily a man spits only in the presence of his fellow men; when a man spits in the presence of women, with no other man present, it can mean only one thing: he is nervous about having something important to say. He said it: “No, the governor, ole George, he aint said a word to me about whether he plans to run or not. He did say one thing, though. He said, and I quote him, that I better take care of this Nail Chism business. It could hurt what chance I’ve got to be a candidate for the nomination for governor. It’s real bad news that Nail is runnin around loose. I shore do need to have a little talk with him.”

Viridis interrupted. “If you’re trying to get me to tell you where he’s hiding, I’m afraid I don’t know anything more about that than you do.”

The judge studied her to determine if she was telling the truth. “I jist want to talk to him,” he said. “I don’t mean him ary bit of harm. In fact, if I can jist git myself nominated for governor, one of the first things I aim to do is give him a full pardon.” The women swapped skeptical glances. “All I want to do,” Judge Villines went on, “is talk to him and tell him that I aint been mixed up in no way whatsoever with those men that he thinks framed him.”

Viridis laughed. “
You,
” she said. “You tried and convicted him and sentenced him to the electric chair. You refused to recommend to Governor Hays a second trial. You refused to sign a petition with six thousand other residents of Newton County, who believe Nail is innocent.”

The judge held up his hands as if she were raining blows down on his head. “Whoa, lady!” he begged. “All I was doin was my duty as the court! The court makes mistakes! Don’t ye know? The court kin only listen to the evidence and listen to the jury, and that there jury of twelve honest men convicted Nail, not me, and I jist had to impose the sentence prescribed by the law and voted by that jury!”

“Did I hear you confess you made a mistake?” Viridis asked.

“I reckon you did! I reckon I did! Everbody makes mistakes, and I’m here to tell ye that if I had to do it all over again, I would’ve found some way the court could’ve let him off! That’s all I want to tell him! If you’ll jist tell me whar’s he’s at, I’ll crawl on my knees to him and tell him I’m sorry!”

The judge sounded as if he were about to break down. Viridis almost felt some sympathy for him. “You really believe that I know where he is?” she asked, and when he nodded, she said, “Well, let me tell you: if I knew where he was, that’s where I would be, right now, instead of here listening to you!”

“You honestly don’t know?” he said.

“He could be dead for all I know!” she said, admitting it to herself now at last, and began to cry.

The judge was uncomfortable, and he stood up and prepared to leave. “Well, if he shows up, I jist want you to know that it would be greatly to his advantage, and yourn, if you’uns would jist let me have a few words with him before he does anything rash.”