The Choiring Of The Trees (53 page)

Rouser kept me good company and didn’t wander off.

I had never seen a dead body before, much less been all alone with one.

It was worse than being alone in a cemetery at night: at least the bodies there are all covered up so you can’t see them.

I thought of reloading my rifle, for protection, but decided I’d better just leave it the way it was.

I tried what Viridis had tried: I called out, “
NAIL
?” and heard my voice echoing up in the glen but didn’t get any reply.

If I hadn’t killed Sull, and Nail wasn’t anywhere around, who had done it? Waymon Chism? But Waymon was gone to Harrison, or was supposed to be.

I began to worry about something else, something important: Doc Swain would be discovering these woods, this intended hiding-place, and if he brought the law up here, they might even go farther up the holler and discover the waterfall and the caverns. What good would it be as a hiding-place if everybody knew about it?

Or maybe it wouldn’t ever be needed as a hiding-place. Maybe Nail wasn’t ever going to come.

When that long hour had dragged out to its close, and the morning was long gone, Viridis returned. There were two other men on horses with her, neither of them a sheriff’s deputy. One was Doc Swain. The other was his father, old Alonzo Swain, who, I realized, was still our justice of the peace, as he had been for many years. The older Doc Swain, who had given up his practice to his son Colvin a few years after the son got his medical degree from a St. Louis mail-order college, was also still deputy coroner for Newton County. So he could serve several functions here.

The younger Doc Swain helped the older down from his horse. Both men first said politely to me, “Howdy, Latha,” and then began to examine the corpse. Doc had a notebook with him, and he made some notes and drew a couple of diagrams showing where the body lay in relation to the trees around it, and then he took a sharp stick and traced an outline of Sull’s body in the dirt, and then he and his father lifted the corpse and slung it over the saddle of Sull’s horse like a sack of meal.

We Bournes had never been able to afford Doc Alonzo Swain, and Doc Plowright had always been our doctor, so the older man didn’t know me too well. Now he looked at me, and the first thing he asked was “How old air ye, gal?”

Of course he hadn’t delivered me. A midwife had done it, without even any help from Doc Plowright. “Goin on fourteen,” I said.

“Do ye want me to question ye out yere in these woods, or do ye wanter go have ye a bite of dinner and then come to my office?” He asked this kindly-like, and I appreciated it.

“I don’t keer,” I said. “Might as well do it here.”

“I’ve done et my dinner anyhow,” he announced, “and so’s Colvin. But you ladies mought be hungry.”

I was flattered he called me a lady, without any of the condescension that one hears in “little lady.” “I can hold off eatin till you’re done with your questions,” I declared.

“All righty,” he said, and motioned for us to sit together on a fallen tree trunk. “Well, number one. Would ye have any reason fer killin this man?”

I laughed. “Do you know anybody who wouldn’t?”

“Please jist answer the questions, Miss,” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “I had all kinds of reasons for killin him. He raped my best friend. He sent a good man to prison and nearly to the ’letric chair. He was follerin this lady, Viridis, and Lord knows what he aimed to do to her. Sure, I had all of kinds of reasons for killin him, and I wish I had. I really wish it was me who had done it. But it wasn’t. I didn’t.”

“Who else do you think it might’ve been?” old Doc Swain asked.

“It could’ve been any man…or woman…or child old enough to hold a rifle. Anybody who knew Sull Jerram and knew what he was like and what he done.” I pointed at the old doctor’s chest. “It could’ve just as well been
you.
”

That didn’t fluster him. He chuckled and glanced at his son and said, “She’s shore right about
that.
Or you, either one, Colvin.”

“Don’t I know it?” the young Doc Swain admitted. “But ask her whar she got this yere Winchester.” He held up the .22.

“Well?” the older man said to me.

“I bought it from Sears, Roebuck through the mail,” I declared truthfully, and added, “Four dollars and twenty-five cents, plus postage.”

“Whar’d you git the money?” he asked. The question contained an insinuation I didn’t like: the Bournes were too poor to afford Doc Swain, too poor to buy their least daughter a shootin-arn.

“Same place you got yours,” I said. “Honest toil.”

The old doctor grinned, and for a moment I thought he would ask me what kind of honest toil, and I was prepared to answer that one too, but he took up a different line of questioning: “You said that Sull…the deceased…was a-follerin this lady. How do you know he was a-follerin her?”

So I started at the beginning: how I had seen a man on a horse riding after Viridis, and how I had followed them, and everything that had happened, including me tripping and falling and dropping my rifle. “I’ll show you where it was,” I offered, and I led them back through the woods to the place where I had been running, and I pointed out the root that had snagged my foot and sent me flying, and I showed them the pile of old leaves where my gun had landed. The younger Doc Swain measured off the distance from this spot to the spot where Sull Jerram had lain dead.

“Hmm,” said old Doc Swain. “Still and all, you’ve got a empty cartridge in that rifle.”

So I told them about the squirrel too.

“What did ye do with the squirrel?” old Doc Swain asked.

“I put it in a pot on the porch,” I pronounced, unmindful of the alliteration.

“I reckon we better go see if it’s still there,” declared the old doctor/j.p./coroner.

We left those woods. As far as I know, the two doctors Swain never did go any farther back up into the glen where the waterfall was. They never did learn of the hiding-place and trysting-place that was still waiting for Viridis and Nail to use, if he ever showed up. They questioned Viridis about what she had been doing, where she was going when Sull was following her, and they checked to make sure that her Smith
&
Wesson was a .38, not a .22, and for that matter hadn’t been fired anytime recently. But she never said anything about her destination at the waterfall, which was beyond sight and earshot of the place where Sull Jerram fell dead.

And that old squirrel was still in that old pot, where I had left it. I figured it sure had been lucky that Rouser had gone with me; if I’d left him at home, he’d have worried the lid off that pot and got that squirrel. But it was in the pot. The younger Doc Swain took his pocketknife and dug out the bullet and matched it up with that spent cartridge in my rifle, and he looked his father in the eye and nodded. The old doctor said, “Wal, Latha, it looks like you aint a suspect no more. I don’t reckon we even need to tell the sherf that you ever was a suspect. We’ll jist say you was the one who discovered the body, and the sherf might want to ask you some questions too, but you jist tell the truth, ’cept you don’t have to say nothing about no rifle you was carryin. No need to do that.”

I wasn’t invited to ride any farther with them. Viridis did; she rode Rosabone onward with them and the body of Sull slung across the saddle of his horse into the village, and said she’d see me later. My folks were dying of impatience for me to tell them everything, which I did. Nearly everything.

We had that squirrel stewed with dumplings for supper, with a mess of greens, and some fresh biscuits, and even though one fat squirrel won’t feed five people, it was the best eating I could ever recall.

Before nightfall everybody in Stay More knew that Sull Jerram was dead, dead, dead, so it was decided to have some kind of celebration and party. The Stay Morons threw a big square dance up to the schoolhouse, and it was a Wednesday besides. Nobody could recall when they’d ever had a square dance that wasn’t on Saturday, or leastways Friday. A Wednesday night square dance was really a special event, and although nobody came right out and said it was being held in celebration of the demise of Sull Jerram, everybody knew that was the reason for it, and Luther Chism showed up with a whole keg of private-stock Chism’s Dew, and even some of the ladies sampled it. I had a taste myself. Old Isaac Ingledew, the champion fiddler of the country, got his instrument out and dusted it off and gave one of the last performances that anybody could ever after recall hearing him play.

Among the revelers and dancers were Rindy Whitter and her new beau, the young driver Virge Tuttle, who still hadn’t gone back to Pettigrew but appeared to have moved in with the Whitters. Rindy was so busy seeing him, which she did all the time, near about, that I had never got the chance to renew my friendship with her. But I had been too preoccupied myself to care.

Waymon Chism still hadn’t returned from Harrison with the medicine, but while the square dance was in progress, pretty far along in the night, he came riding up; he’d brought the medicine and Doc Swain the younger was up at the home place right now administering it to Seth, who was already pretty cheered up with the news of Sull’s passing. Now Waymon was ready to join the celebration himself.

But those two sheriff’s deputies, who’d been participating in the square dance along with everybody else, and had their own share of Chism’s Dew, told Waymon that he was under arrest. Despite his alibi of having gone to Harrison, despite the evidence of the medicine he’d obtained there, he was still the number-one suspect in the murder, and the deputies had instructions from Duster Snow to bring him in. Poor Waymon spent the night in the Jasper jail. The square dance celebration fizzled out about the time they took him away.

Usually when there was whiskey at a square dance, the party was over when some of the men got so drunk they started a fight. There wasn’t any fight this time, just a big argument: no less than six different men, all of them intoxicated, each claimed that
he
had shot Sull Jerram. But nobody awarded the honor and the prize to any one of them.

And that was the end of June. Next morning July was upon us. Hot, and humid, but heavenly because the worst man who ever came from Stay More was no longer among the living. Folks said they weren’t going to let Sull Jerram be buried in the Stay More cemetery. Tilbert Jerram, his next-of-kin in town, said he figured Sull would be just as happy to be buried in Jasper, so that was where they were going to bury him, and Irene, who was still his legal wife, let it be known she didn’t plan to attend whatever funeral they were going to give him.

That same July morning was a scorcher, and my labors in the garden left me lathered with sweat. I was so eager to get washed off at my little waterfall that something along the way scarcely caught my eye, and I had to turn back and look again to make sure: the bent-down mullein stalk, the one I’d named after Nail, was standing proud and tall.

Off

H
e had reached the point of no longer expecting to get to the opposite shore. The current of the swift Arkansas had been more than he had bargained for or could have struggled against. Within a minute after plunging in from the south bank, with his shoes tied together and wrapped around his neck, he suffered a bad cramp in his left calf and had to stop swimming and try to get the cramp out: several repetitions of pulling up on his foot and bending his toes back and then kicking his leg straight out finally removed the cramp from his left calf, but then a cramp in his right foot stopped him, and while working on that foot, he noticed the log coming swiftly at him, nearly upon him before he saw it, and thrashed wildly to get out of its way, just in the nick of time, or perhaps not soon enough: a jagged limb on the log raked his hip and cut deep into his skin.

He had not even reached the midpoint of the narrow river crossing before beginning to wonder if he would be able to make it. Each time he paused for breath or to turn over and swim on his back for relief, he found himself dodging a log or limb or being spun around and sucked under by a whirlpool. Once when he had resurfaced, disoriented, after fighting a sucking whirlpool, he swam a good distance back toward the closer south bank before realizing his mistake, and he was tempted to continue in that direction.

But he reversed himself and kept going, although aware that the current had forced him far below the narrow crossing, out into the broadened expanse of floodplain. He alternated between breaststrokes, backstrokes, and sidestrokes, the last especially whenever a wave of the current hit him and he needed to keep watching where he was going. He had reached what seemed to be midway of the broadened river, beyond which there was no turning back, before realizing that he simply had no energy remaining, no strength, that his months of incarceration without exercise had left him totally out of condition for such a marathon. By then it was too late. Out in the middle of the broadened channel the current was still so strong that he had ceased to make more than a feeble effort at fighting across it, not really making any progress but continuing to swing his arms overhead, just to keep himself from surrendering to the river.

Finally he had no choice but to grab hold of the next large log that came floating past, and to cling to it for a long time, as it carried him downstream. He wanted to hang on to that log forever, or until it carried him to New Orleans or wherever it was headed. But he knew it would eventually reach Little Rock, a place he never wanted to see again, so he let go of the log and continued swimming toward the impossibly distant north bank. The brief respite of clinging to the log had renewed his strength enough to swim with mighty strokes.

If only he had been able to keep that up. But as the north shore seemed to come closer and he felt all his muscles failing him, he lashed his right arm over his head with such desperate energy that a terrible pain shot through his shoulder. He screamed. He knew it was no mere cramp or muscle spasm; he had thrown something out of joint. From then on, he could not move his right arm at all, and the pain was all he could think of.