The Choiring Of The Trees (54 page)

With his left hand he paddled several more strokes to keep afloat, until another log came drifting within reach and he caught it with his left hand and hung on. He did not know how long he clung to that log, conscious of nothing but the terrible pain in his shoulder and the darkening of the sky; the sun must have set. Seized with frantic thirst, he was almost tempted to drink the brown water but dared not. Then he roused himself from his pain to observe that the log was not in the midcurrents of the river but was caught in an eddy swirling toward a bend in the river; his log was headed for a great raft of snags. He kicked free from it just before it crashed into the pile of other logs, but the currents of the eddy had been too turbulent and confusing for him to fight with only one hand.

He must have lost consciousness—briefly, blessèdly—because he had stopped screaming from the pain. It was fading twilight when he found the world again and discovered his situation: he had been wedged into the pile of debris, clear of the water except for one leg and his useless right arm. He pulled himself up and got into a sitting position from which he could get his bearings: he had reached the north shore! Or not the shore itself, not dry land with earth beneath his feet, but this vast tangle of logs and limbs shunted into a bend of the shore. He crawled from one log to another, trying to hold his dead arm against his stomach, trying to hold his balance with the other hand, slipping, falling, from log to log, trying to extricate himself from the brush pile. It took a long, long time. When he had at long last reached solid earth, or sand, and thrown himself exhausted upon it, it was full night, full dark, and he slept.

Mosquitoes awakened him. Those biting him on his right side, or anywhere below his waist, he swatted and killed with his good left hand, but he could not swat at any mosquito alighting on his left arm or his left side. He spent most of the rest of the night battling the mosquitoes, too tired to get up and move away from the riverbank.

The first light of morning found him moving again: he walked away at last from the river, heading north across a sandbar, wading an eddy beyond the sandbar to climb a steep bank of clay and reach the first stand of cottonwood trees, who seemed to be singing him a welcome. He slaked his terrible thirst by using a handful of grass to mop up the morning dew from plants and rocks and squeezing the drops into his mouth: the beginning of his practice in doing things with his left hand alone. But the left hand soon began to fail him when he neared the first human habitation and a dog came to meet him, shattering the stillness with vicious barks; with his right hand he reached down to pick up a rock, and the searing pain reminded him that he couldn’t use that arm; he switched to the left hand and attempted to throw the rock at the dog but missed so badly that the dog itself seemed amused and drew even nearer. Finally he picked up a heavy stick and lashed out repeatedly until the dog withdrew. Leaning toward the left, instinctively toward the northwest, he went on, avoiding the dog and its master, and whatever remained of the settlement of Nail, Arkansas, as it once had been called.

The pain in his shoulder did not let up, but he had grown almost accustomed to it. Still, it distracted him entirely from the wound in his hip until he unfastened his pants to relieve himself and looked down to see the mass of coagulated blood along his hip and leg. He realized he needed to clean the wound, and the next thing to find, even before something to eat, was fresh water, water safe enough to clean the wound.

He came to one of the abandoned homesteads northwest of Nail, in a stand of cottonwood trees and briars. Hardly a homestead: just a cabin, a squatter’s shack, clearly long abandoned, although the rope on the well bucket was not fully decayed and the bucket itself, even rusted through with holes, held enough water to be drawn and inspected and found to be pure enough for washing the wound. Once the wound was cleansed, and freshly bleeding, he discovered it was deep enough to need stitches. Beyond the perimeter of cottonwoods he found what he needed: a yarrow plant, like those he’d fed his sheep, but this one wild, whose leaves he crushed to smear on his wound and slow its bleeding; and a common plantain, whose leaves mashed to a pulp made a mild astringent; and a lone loblolly pine, whose pitch he transferred from one of its wounds to his own. “I need this more than you do,” he had said to the tree, realizing these were the first words he’d spoken since greeting the sun the morning before. The pine would have answered him if it could: it would have gladly contributed a bit of its pitch to disinfect and protect his open wound.

Then he returned to the cabin and searched it for something to dress the wound, but there was no cloth, save the fragile, grimy remnants of curtains on one window. The interior was bare of anything but the twisted remains of an iron bedstead, and some discarded kitchen items: a battered blue enamel washpan, a broken fork, a bent tableknife. In one corner of the floor was a small pile of walnuts still in their husks, perhaps gathered by squirrels or chipmunks, but Nail had not noticed a walnut tree in the vicinity. There was a small fireplace in a chimney at one end of the room, and Nail considered making a fire in it. He considered staying awhile, letting his wound close and hoping his shoulder would stop hurting, snaring some small game to cook, taking advantage of the supply of well water. He was impatient to keep moving toward home but felt the need to recover from the river crossing.

He had to dry his soaked shoes. Even untying their laces, which had held them together around his neck during the river crossing, was nearly impossible using only one hand and his teeth. The cottonwood tree, or eastern poplar, has branches easily broken by the wind, and the yard surrounding the cabin was littered with an abundance of firewood. The brown seeds of the cottonwood have clusters of white, cottony hairs, hence the name cottonwood, and these, when dry, make good tinder. He spent the rest of the morning just preparing his fire: in the fireplace he arranged a pyramid of cottonwood sticks and branches over a pyramid of kindling: twigs and bark and some splinters from the wood of the cabin itself. Then on the hearth he carefully assembled the little mound of tinder: first a layer of cottonwood seed fluff, then some woodworm dust on top of that. He had to walk barefoot for an hour around the neighborhood, but avoiding the direction where he’d met the dog, until he found a small piece of flint, not indigenous to the spot but washed down by a flood from some higher elevation. He took the flint back to the cabin and held it down with his right foot beside the mound of tinder while holding the tableknife in his left hand and striking the flint until sparks brought the first wisp of smoke from the tinder, and then he knelt and blew the sparks into flame and shoved the tinder pile beneath the kindling. By noon a fire was going in his fireplace. He stepped outside to examine the smoke rising from the chimney: it was not conspicuous. The nearest neighbor might not see it.

The day was hot; he did not need the fire for warmth, but all afternoon he built up a pile of coals in the fireplace to roast whatever he could find. For lunch he cracked some of the walnuts out of their husks; every other one was dried or rotten, but the edible ones made him a meal. It had been a lot of work, with one hand, to crack the nuts beneath a rock and to pick their meat.

For dessert there were no end of wild raspberries. He was careful not to overindulge and give himself indigestion. Later in the cabin, noticing the shard of mirror still hanging on the wall, he brushed the grime from it and took a look at himself: a fright, but a comical one, with the red all around his mouth. He made no attempt to wash it off.

He fashioned himself, from a limb of Osage orange, or bois d’arc, a digging-stick, an all-purpose pointed tool for turning up roots or for spearing: he spent part of the afternoon digging up a mess of wild onions, slowed by having to use the stick with only one hand: it was more a poking-stick than a digging-stick. But he quickly acquired dexterity in wielding it, so that once, when he stumbled upon a rabbit hole just as the animal was emerging, almost by reflex he stabbed it with the digging-stick, enough to maim it, and then administered the coup de grâce by using the stick as a club. He gutted the rabbit by venting it and squeezing its innards toward its middle and then holding it high overhead with his good left hand and swinging it with great force downward and between his legs, causing its entrails to be expelled. He saved the heart, liver, and kidneys, roasting those too in the fireplace, for a supper of both raw and roasted onions with rabbit meat, washed down with good well water, and another dessert of wild raspberries.

But before roasting the rabbit he had carefully stripped away and saved the tendons of the muscles, planning eventually to dry them and twist the sinews into the cord of the bowstring for his bow and arrow. He was that optimistic: that he would somehow regain the use of his right hand and arm.

Sitting in front of the cabin after supper, watching the sun go down, feeling free and safe and contented, and even burping a few times, he did not even hear the dog sneaking up on him until the dog, the same one he had encountered earlier, was within a few feet. The dog began to bay, as if it had treed a coon. It did not come any closer, within reach of his digging-stick, but continued baying until, moments later, its owner appeared: a man with a long beard, face hidden beneath a floppy fedora, and cradling in one arm a double-barreled shotgun.

The man did not raise the shotgun to point it at Nail but carried it loose in the crook of his arm. He regarded Nail quizzically for a while before saying, “What’s yore name?”

Nail was tempted to answer truthfully but paused. Could this man know that there was a wanted escaped convict by his name? Was this man’s house, hereabouts, within reach of the news of the escape? For that matter, where was he? Nail had no idea, except that it was near the river; the drifting logs might even have carried him beyond Little Rock. “Where am I?” he answered.

The two questions remained there in the air between them, exchanged, unanswered, for a long moment. Did they answer simultaneously, or was the man just a step ahead of him? No, it seemed that both answers, in the form of that one word, were spoken by both men at once.

“Nail.”

Then they just regarded each other with further cautious surprise for a spell until, again simultaneously, they spoke: “What?”

“I ast ye, what’s yore name?” the man said.

“And you jist said it, didn’t ye?” Nail said.

“Why’d ye ast me whar ye are, if you done already knew?” the man asked.

“What?” Nail said again. “You aint said, yit. Where am I?”

“Nail,” the man said. “What’s yore name?”

“I aint about to tell ye my last name till you tell me where I’m at.”

“I done did. You need to know the name of the state too? Whar’d you float down from? This here’s Arkansas.”

“I know it’s Arkansas,” Nail said impatiently. “What part of it?”

“Nail,” the man said again. “I don’t need to know yore last name. What do folks call ye?”

“Just Nail,” Nail said.

“That’s right,” the man said.

And so it went until it dawned upon first Nail and then the man that they were speaking at cross-purposes, each giving the same answer to a different question. It was Nail who finally got it figured out enough to ask, “You mean the name of this here place is Nail?”

“What I been tellin ye the last ten minutes, dangdurn it. Don’t tell me yore name if ye don’t wanter. I don’t keer.”

“My name is Nail,” Nail said.

“Huh? Is that a fack now? I thought ye was funnin me.” The man studied him more closely. “You got any kinfolks hereabouts?”

“Not as I know of, but you never kin tell, if it’s got that name. It’s a ole fambly name.”

“Yo’re the sorriest-lookin feller ever I seed,” the man said. “What happened to yore haid?”

It struck Nail that his shaved head and his face smeared with raspberry juice made him look either injured or comical, or both. His faded and torn chambray shirt and trousers would not have given him away as a convict; and now he was glad that being in the death hole had not required him to wear stripes like the other convicts. “I had the mange,” he said, rubbing his head. And then, running his hand down his cheek: “And this aint nothin but berry stain.”

Gesturing with the gun barrel toward the chimney, the man asked, “You got a far burnin in thar?”

Nail nodded and asked, “This place don’t belong to nobody, does it?”

“Belongs to me,” the man said. “You wanter buy it?”

“Naw, I’m jist a-passin through,” Nail said. “I jist aimed to stay a night or two.”

“Aint no bed in thar, I guess ye noticed,” the man said. “But you jist come over to my place. Aint far from yere.”

“I don’t want to trouble ye,” Nail said.

“No trouble, and I got a spare bed fer comp’ny. Come on.”

So Nail went with the man, first banking the coals in his fireplace and retrieving his shoes, which were pretty much dried by now. As Nail put them on, with difficulty using just one hand, and unable to tie the laces, the man observed, “Swum the river, did ye? What happened to yore good hand?”

“I reckon I must’ve th’owed my shoulder out of joint,” Nail said.

That night, in the man’s cabin, which wasn’t any larger than the abandoned cabin Nail had taken up residence in, but was in reasonably good condition, the man urged a tin cup full of some strong, fiery whiskey upon Nail, who, being the equal of any of his forebears as a connoisseur of corn liquor, coughed and gagged and declined a second helping, but the man said, “You’d best swaller all of that stuff ye kin hold, or it’ll kill ye when I fix yore arm.”

“You’ve fixed arms before?” Nail asked apprehensively.

“A time or two,” the man said. “Drink up.” Nail swallowed as much of the bad booze as he could force down his throat; his stomach was feeling giddier than his head. The man said, “Let’s take off that shirt,” then unbuttoned and removed it from him, as a valet might have done. Then he asked, “You ready? Better take one more big swaller.”

Nail drained his tin cup, with deliberate speed that left both his head and his stomach lightened, while the man probed and poked Nail’s upper arm and shoulder, and then, quicker than Nail could think, threw a strange, complicated two-arm lock around his upper body and lunged and pulled and jerked.