Only these severe winter storms we’ve been having have prevented me from attempting to find and to visit Staymore. But when we get a thaw in January, I’m going to locate it…even if I can only reach it on horseback! (I should have said I have two talents: the other one is that I am a “cowgirl.”)
I have three requests, if you will be so kind:
1. Where is Staymore? I have a map showing Newton County but cannot locate your town. Is it north of Jasper? What kind of roads lead to it?
2. What people should I talk to? Can you give me the names of any witnesses who can account for your whereabouts at the time of the crime? Also, any character witnesses. Who was your best friend?
3. Before I go, is there anything I can do for you? Is there anything you need? Will they allow me to send you a basket of fruit and some cookies? May I smuggle you a book or two? Do you enjoy reading? Any favorite authors? Are you well clothed? Do you need any personal articles? Please do not hesitate to respond to these requests, and do not think of the expense. Meanwhile please accept the enclosed trifle as a token, a talisman, a keepsake, a substitute for a real Yuletide. Merry Christmas, and many more.
Sincerely,
Viridis Monday
Nail Chism read this a second time before he opened his present. In due course he would come to know it by heart. He would unfold it and read it when no one else was looking (and no one else ever was), again and again, until its creases broke and it began to turn dirty and frayed. But for now he read it only twice, and then he picked open the tiny wad of tissue paper.
Inside was a gent’s charm, the kind of chain ornament you hook on one end of your watch chain, if you have a watch, but Nail didn’t. It was made of gold and must have cost her several dollars. But she must have had it special-made by some jeweler, because it didn’t look like a store-boughten gent’s charm. It was in the shape of a tree. Not a Christmas pine or a cedar, nor a hardwood you’d be able to recognize, but just a tree tree, no mistake. Nail turned it over. She’d had the trunk on the backside of the tree engraved in tiny letters: To N.C. from V.M. XMAS 14.
Even if he’d had a watch, and a watchpocket to put it in, he wouldn’t have worn this on a chain for all the world to see. Instead, he attached it to the string around his neck that held his dagger, and wore them both hidden inside his shirt and jacket. It was the nicest Christmas present he’d ever gotten. He could hear that little tree singing to him.
And on Christmas afternoon the Salvation Army was permitted to come into the building and serve a soup that actually had some chicken in it, and with real biscuit besides. The men were required to sit through a long sermon before they were allowed to drink the soup, which was cold by then, but Nail was able to make it to the mess hall on his own legs, for the first time in weeks, and to drink his soup.
Afterward, as the men were waiting to leave the mess hall, required to keep lockstepping in place until the line could move again, Nail discovered that he was lifting and setting his feet right beside the standing figure of Mr. Harris Burdell, who was observing the Christmas festivities.
“Warden Burdell, sir,” Nail managed to say, although his words were nearly drowned by the men tramping the floor with their feet. “I sure do ’preciate you lettin us men have a good Christmas dinner like this. I know I don’t deserve it, and I know I don’t deserve nothin on account of my misbehavior. But I jist want to thank you, sir. It is real good of you. And Merry Christmas to you, Mr. Burdell.”
“Same to you, Chism,” Burdell said, without smiling but without any rancor or malice in his voice.
“Sir, my brother told me that our ole mother is a-dyin, and he ast me could I jist send her a few last words. Sir, would there be any way I could git me some writin-paper and a pencil? Sir, I’d do jist anything if I could have me somethin to write a letter to my dyin mother.”
The line was beginning to move. Nail looked pleadingly over his shoulder at Mr. Burdell, who did not seem to have heard him. But a few days later one of the blacks who waited on the table at dinner wordlessly placed beside Nail’s plate a lead pencil and a penny tablet of lined paper, which, Nail counted, contained twenty sheets. He used a sheet dutifully to write a letter for Mr. Burdell to see, censor, and mail:
Dear Momma,
Waymon told me about you. I hope you are better. You know we are going to meet again in Heaven, where they are saving a special place for you. I’m sorry you did not get to see me again. Waymon said you were not able to come with him to Little Rock, and I understand. You must try to take care of your self better. I wish there was something I could say to make you feel better but all I can say is I love you and do not worry about me. What happens to me is in the hands of some one far better than me. And I aim to see you, all bye and bye, and you can count on it. Please be happy.
Your son with love for ever,
Nail
His mother might puzzle just a little over that—if she got it—but he knew that Waymon would help her understand any of it that she couldn’t, and he would explain the rest of it to her when he saw her, not in Heaven, which was a strange land to him, but in Stay More, one of these days.
Then he used several sheets of the penny tablet to write the following, which he did not give to Mr. Burdell to see, censor, and keep from mailing.
December 29–31, 1914
Dear Miss Monday,
How can I hope to answer? You write like the morning breeze soughing through the cedars, like a hive full of honey, like sun climb on the ridge, you write easy as breathing, like an angel’s sigh, and I am dumb.
How can I hope to thank you? You give me more than a gift, far more than this tiny tree trophy I’m wearing now next to my lungs, far more than any fruit basket or book you want to bring me, even far more than the many hours you’ve done already spent talking to folks on my behalf. You give me hope, real hope, but that is not the greatest gift. You give me your “attentions and devotion,” although you call them a burden and they aren’t, but they are not the greatest gift either. You give me words nice as music singing where my merit hides, but they are not the gift which gladdens me greatestly.
The gift which greatestly humbles me beyond any speaking of thanks is that this world don’t have very many women in it who are able to like themself enough so that they have so much left over they can give some to a man, and you are one of those, you give me some of that self-respect or self-liking that you have left over after you get done helping yourself to it.
I would beg you please don’t misunderstand if I did not think you know what I mean without any insult or accusing you of pride or airs or vanity, which I don’t mean at all. You are not just a uncommon kind woman, Viridis Monday, but a woman more uncommon than that: a smart kind woman. Not a woman who is kind because she is too dumb to know any better and goes around trusting everbody and being sweet and stupid and benevolent because there’s not a thought in her head to keep her from thinking she ought to trust and be sweet. No, you have thought it all over. You have even thought about how much of that trust and sweetness you ought to spend on yourself before you go throwing it around to others less deserving.
And then you discovered you had enough to spare and you shared it with me. I can accept it from you with gladness and gratefulness because I know you can afford to spend it, which maybe you can’t afford to do on a basket of fruit or a book, not to mention this solid gold gent’s charm you gave me. You won’t misunderstand this either: that I sure do appreciate the gent’s charm, and I do know exactly why it’s a tree, and why you asked them to make it like that, and I will still be wearing it to my grave or old age, whichever comes first, but it bothers me some that it cost you money that maybe you couldn’t afford, the way you can afford to let me have some of that leftover self-respect.
You do not know me. I believe that you are blessed with some kind of ability to look a person in the eye before doing their picture and tell whether that person is good, bad, or not worth shooting. You make better pictures than I ever even
drempt was possible to draw. I don’t know you either but I know that you must have seen all kinds of eyes. Clear, squinty, keen, beady, bright, dim, smiling, pink, crossed, hawk, walled, dull, catty, goggled, popped, bug, glared, blinked, squinched, cataracted. Enough of all kinds to be able to look in their eye and tell what demons are afollowing them or what angels are aleading them.
But you don’t know me or any of my life except what they said I done to that girl, which you know I didn’t do. You don’t even know how the way that I was raised and what I come to want to do with my life was such that I couldn’t never even have thought about doing it to her. You don’t know the hills of Stay More, and you don’t know the Ingledews, Duckworths, Bournes, Whitters, Plowrights, Coes, Bullens, Murrisons, Dinsmores, Kimbers, and Swains, and only one Chism, me, and not much of me. Even if you did know ever last one of them, you’d just have the makings of a start on knowing somebody like Sull Jerram, who is waiting at the end of your investigation like a toad sitting on a rock all day long waiting for a butterfly to get within shot of his tongue.
But Sull Jerram is not real Stay More folks, though he was born there. The closest Judge Jerram ever come to being Stay More folks was somehow persuading my nice but not very bright sister Irene into marrying him. She’s my half sister, actually. But I am not even going to start in trying to tell you about all these people. If you want to begin from scratch and try to get to know Stay More, in the dead of winter, or at any time, you would probably enjoy it, even if you never found a shred of proof that I didn’t rape Dorinda Whitter.
She’s not the one you should start with. She’s the so-called victim, and many a time I have told myself that she couldn’t be just playing off that way, that somebody actually must have done it to her. And I think maybe whoever done it to her done it just so the law would believe her when she got up and said what he told her to say.
There is another girl you ought to talk to first, if you are really of a mind to visit Stay More. Her name is Latha Bourne, and she is about the same age as Dorinda, and I reckon you could say they was best friends at one time, maybe still. But she is another one of them females who like yourself is able to be honest enough with herself to have some left over to be honest and kind and smart with other people. If you want to look into a pair of eyes, start with hers.
As for character witnesses, any man, woman or child in Stay More who ever knew me or just saw me out yonder in the pasture with my sheep will likely tell you whatever you need to know. But you should be sure and talk to the fellows that sit on Ingledew’s store porch, except this time of year they won’t be out there on the porch, they’ll be inside sitting around his potbelly stove. And Willis Ingledew himself can tell you I was there on that porch that time they said she claimed it was done to her. I’m sorry to have to say, though, that there isn’t one of those folks who could let me call them best friend.
I’m not too sure just what that is, tell you the honest truth. My brothers are both real good friends but they’re brothers so maybe that don’t count.
Right now I feel like you are my best friend.
On the back side of this sheet I’ve drawed a sort of map that ought to help you get from Jasper to Stay More (that is the way it is always spelled, not Staymore all one word the way you did it). All the roads thereabouts are hell on autos. But I have to tell you, Viridis Monday, I can’t imagine a lady riding a horse into Stay More. Nobody there has ever heard tell of a cowgirl and their tongues are sure to wag out of their faces.
But come to think on it, let them wag. This time of year they don’t have nothing to talk about anyhow. Just give each and ever one of those Stay More folks that smile of yours, which is I swear the nicest smile I ever saw on any creature except one of my late lamented sheep. Tell everbody I said hello, and give them all my love.
And to you, good lady, there are no words, except:
Your friend,
Nail
P.S. I really can’t use anything myself I don’t already have, but if you’d like to bring something the next time you come or send Mr. Cobb with it, there is a boy here who is a friend of mine and very good at drawing like you and even has hair like yours but he has nothing to draw with excepting a piece of chalk. If you could smuggle one of those drawing pencils like you use and that type of pad. We would appreciate it.
Then he just had to wait for a chance to get the letter out to her via Farrell Cobb. He did not have an envelope, but he kept the pages folded three times and pressed inside his copy of Dr. Hood’s Plain Talks and Common Sense Medical Advisor, where he could get the letter out and slip it to Cobb the next time he showed up.
January came, a new year, 1915, without any observance or notice. The few men who had old calendars ripped them up, and the fewer men who had new calendars brought them out and began to mark off the days. The flyspeck room always had a waiting list of patients suffering frostbite from being sent off to work at the lumber yard or the brickyard or on the Rock Island railroad. Nail was able to walk around pretty well, although he’d lost forty pounds and wouldn’t have known himself if he’d had a mirror to meet himself in, which he didn’t, but he was not able to be sent out to work, even if it was permitted, which it wasn’t. Convicts under sentence of death, according to law, could not be made to work, or even volunteer to work, and he was still under sentence of death although he wore stripes like the other men (condemned men, by the same law, could not be made to wear stripes since it was assumed they would never escape). He could tell by feel that his hair was growing back in; it was just as well he couldn’t see that it was coming back in irregular patches of white and his usual old brownish blond.
He didn’t have a calendar, but he was well enough and sane enough to keep count of the days, and to know that two weeks of January went by before he ever got a chance to “mail” his letter in care of his lawyer. Those two weeks were restless ones. The other men weren’t speaking to him. If his harmonica at Christmas had temporarily thawed the chill of their hatred for a child-molester, it was just as temporary as the thaw in Fat Gabe’s cold blood. Nobody spoke to Nail except Timbo Red.
The boy sensed that Nail was a fellow mountaineer, even without recognizing it in his voice. One morning while marking up the floor with his chalk as Nail watched him, Timbo Red looked up and said, “Do you ’member what a bar looks lak?”
“Why, shore,” Nail said, a bit surprised that someone had spoken to him.
“Could ye draw one fer me?”
Nail laughed. He could see a bear as plain as if one were sitting on the edge of the bunk, but he couldn’t draw a bear, or anything else. “Son, I can just barely draw my name,” he said. “But why don’t ye give it a try, and I’ll tell ye what’s right and what aint.”
So Timbo Red commenced attempting to draw a bear from memory or imagination, and Nail would point out that the ears were a little off, or the nose was too flat, and the eyes looked a little more gentle than that, et cetera. Soon, between Nail’s talking and Timbo’s drawing, they had themselves a pretty fair bear.
Nail wanted to tell Timbo Red about Miss Monday. He wanted to tell the boy that he hoped to get him one of those drawing-sticks made of charcoal that real artists use, and something to draw on more permanent than a pissed-on floor. But he didn’t want to count his chickens before they hatched, and he hadn’t even been able to send the request off to the lady.
Nail and Timbo Red talked about other things. They talked about hunting and fishing, and which was the best gun for a squirrel and the best bait for a bass. Timbo Red had never seen a panther up close, and Nail described one and their habits and how to shoot one if you had to.
Sometimes, when they weren’t talking about wildlife, Nail would tell the boy some of the old tall tales that he’d heard from the oldtimers: tales of kings and princesses and monsters, tales of trickery and daring and brave escape. Nail had never before been a storyteller, just a listener, and he was a little surprised to discover he had a talent for it. The boy made a rapt a
udience, especially for the stories about brave escape, and that helped.
Out of the blue one evening Timbo Red asked him, “Was the gal ye took willin, or didje really have to force her?”
Nail stared at the boy, not understanding the question for a long moment. Then he simply said, “There wasn’t no gal.”
Timbo Red, for one, believed him. He got Nail to tell him the history, to tell him about Dorinda Whitter and Judge Sull Jerram and the county sheriff and the moonshine business and all that. When Nail had finished the long story, Timbo Red declared, “I knew a gal lak thet wunst.” Timbo Red talked about this old Stone County gal who was cut from the same bolt of gingham that Rindy was, and who got an innocent man in bad trouble, although he left the country before they could send him to the chair. “What’s thet cheer like?” Timbo Red inquired, and wanted Nail to give him a complete description of Old Sparky. On the floor Timbo Red drew a chalk picture of Old Sparky that was amazing, considering he had never actually seen the chair himself. For some reason that drawing was allowed to remain for several days before it got pissed away.
One day Nail was telling Timbo Red the story of the king and his daughter Rhonda, who was beheaded by her father because she wouldn’t let him seduce her. The climax of this awful tale was interrupted by the appearance of Farrell Cobb. Nail just looked up from watching the reactions of his listener to his tale and there was the lawyer standing there, unsmiling. Farrell Cobb himself looked like someone who’d just been required to behead his own daughter. He looked like a preacher at a funeral. Nail’s heart took a jump and got caught in his throat.
“Bad news, huh?” Nail said.
Cobb nodded. “I regret to say,” he obviously regretted to say, “that the state Supreme Court doesn’t want to hear your appeal.”
“What do you mean?” Nail asked. “Did they shut the door on ye?”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 165
