The Choiring Of The Trees

by Donald Harington

  “He’ll have to draw it first,” Waymon said. “He don’t carry it in no hip-holster like the sherf does. If he started to pull that thang on me, I’d strangle him before he could git his finger to the right place on it.”

  “Son, you’d jist better git yoreself a arn,” Seth said to Waymon, and the argument resumed as if Viridis were not listening to it. She sat and listened and tried to figure it out. Waymon refused to carry any weapon other than a pocketknife, which every man carried, not as a weapon but a tool, a utensil. Waymon wasn’t planning to do any violence to Sull Jerram unless something happened to Nail, and now it looked as if maybe this lady Miss Monday could stop them from killing Nail.

  But Waymon’s parents and Irene were convinced that Sull Jerram intended to kill Waymon, not so much in actual self-defense as in prevention of Waymon’s ever placing him in a position of having to defend himself. They tried to get Waymon to remember that the sheriff was on Sull’s side, and in fact Sull’s being county judge made him the sheriff’s boss, even if they weren’t such good buddies. But Waymon insisted he wasn’t afraid of no sheriff neither.

  After Waymon and Faye had gone home, Nancy and Irene put on their winter wraps and took Viridis out to look at the place. After a big midday dinner they needed a hike, and they walked all the way down into the holler where the big Chism still was perched beside the spring branch on a ledge beneath a bluff. It wasn’t in operation at that time, but Nancy gave Viridis an explanation of how it worked, and Viridis wanted to know which part of the procedure Nail had been responsible for, and they showed her. Then Viridis wanted to see Nail’s sheep pastures, and they took her to them, although they were bare of sheep and even of most grass, just patches of snow melting in the afternoon sun on the hillsides. Coming back to the house, they showed Viridis the maple tree at one corner of the front yard, its branches doing their best to wave at her because she couldn’t quite hear its gentle singing. Viridis stood at the base of the tree and looked at the roots over which Nail had built highways for his toy wagons, and she could almost see his tin soldiers fighting on the parapets of the roots’ knees.

  Then Viridis was exposed awkwardly to her first experience of what we all of us take for granted: the traditional ritual of leave-taking and exchanging of polite, conventional invitations and counterinvitations.

  Viridis said she had to find the Bourne place and talk with young Latha, as Nail had suggested.

  Nancy looked properly stricken and said, “Don’t be a-rushin off! Better take supper with us and stay all night.”

  Viridis was supposed to counter by asking Nancy to come and go home with her, but Viridis didn’t know this. She just said she’d be back the next day, or soon, and she thanked Nancy for the hospitality and the generous heaping of Nail she’d served up. Nancy told her which turns to take to get to the Bourne place.

  And here she came! I was just home from school and doing my chores, redding up the front porch with a broom, when here came that Ingledew phaeton (although I didn’t know that’s what it was; the last time the governor had driven it was before my time) a-turning into our yard. You could have swept me off the porch with a feather. Later, long after she’d gone, I would look at myself in the mirror with my lower jaw a-hanging open, just to see how awful I looked that way: she could probably see the bad teeth that E.H. Ingledew hadn’t pulled yet. It’s a wonder I had sense enough finally to close my mouth and answer her eventually, some time after she’d said, “You must be Latha.”

  Surely I had the sense to at least nod my head before I could find my voice? Maybe not. Maybe I couldn’t even find my voice, because she went on and said, “My name is Viridis Monday, and I’m from Little Rock. I work for a newspaper. We’re doing a story about Nail Chism of Stay More, who has been condemned to die in the electric chair, and I was told that you could give me some information that would help us.”

  Still I couldn’t find my voice, except to say to Rouser, our dog, “Hush, Rouser! You jist hush!” His barking soon brought my father and mother and my sisters Barb and Mandy out of the house. Paw kicked old Rouser off the porch, and that shut him up. Momma said, and I could have died of mortification, “We caint buy nothin today, thank ye.”

  The lady smiled. She was the most beautiful lady I’d ever seen even a picture of, and she had the nicest smile I’d ever thought a body could have, and I’ve been practicing it ever since. “I’m not selling anything,” she said, and then she repeated word for word what she’d just said to me, and she added, “Nail Chism suggested that I might talk with your daughter Latha about the circumstances of the case. He feels that she can tell me the truth.”

  “Wal, come on in and set by the far,” Maw invited her, and we all went into the house, into the front room that was my parents’ bedroom but also served as our parlor, so to speak, because you could sit on a divan as well as the bed, and the divan was up anent the fireplace. They gave her Paw’s chair, and Paw had to sit on the divan with Momma, and all three of us girls sat side by side on the edge of the bed, with me in the middle, until Momma said, “Latha, why don’t ye brew us up a pot of that coffee I save for the preacher?”

  And I jumped up and started for the kitchen, but the lady said, “No, thank you, please, I’ve been drinking coffee all day up at the Chisms’.”

  “Oh,” Momma said. “You’ve done talked to them, have ye?”

  “Yes,” Viridis said, and she was wondering how she could politely get me alone to herself, so she added, “and I’m trying to talk to as many people as I can while I’m in Stay More. I’d like to talk with each one of you, but I’d like to talk to you one at a time, if that’s all right, and I want to start with Latha.”

  Paw gave Momma the elbow in her ribs, and a severe look. Mandy and Barb looked at each other like they’d just remembered it was Friday and they had something to do to get ready to go into Jasper tomorrow. Momma was the last to leave the room, and said, “But don’t ye be a-rushin off, ma’am. Better jist take supper with us, and stay all night.” By this time Viridis was beginning to understand that that was just what everybody said, all the time, whether they wanted you to or not.

  The lady did stay to supper, but only because it was already getting cold on the table before she got done talking with me and she couldn’t very well walk out and leave it to get even colder after they’d waited for us. We talked from right then, when my parents and sisters went out of the parlor and left us alone, until suppertime and then some past, before Viridis finally knew what to say the third or fourth time my mother asked her to spend the night, and even then she didn’t know that you’re supposed to counter it by saying, Come go home with me, so she just said, finally, that she was expected back by the old woman living in Jacob Ingledew’s house, where she’d left her horse, and had to return this team and buggy to Willis Ingledew’s livery. We were relieved, I guess, because we wouldn’t have had anyplace for the lady to sleep, although I’d have been more than pleased to fix myself a pallet on the floor and let her have my place in the bed with Mandy and Barb. That’s how much I loved her, by then.

  But all of that didn’t come until past dark. We still had an hour or so of daylight left. After the others left us alone in the parlor, Viridis looked at me and gave me that galuptious smile again and tried to hold me with her eyes. I was still too shy to look her in the eye at first, and I reckon I must have kept pawing the rug with my feet and trying to find something to do with my hands besides sit on them. I still hadn’t said a word.

  “Nail thinks you believe he’s innocent,” she said.

  Finally I had to look her in the eye to let her know that I meant this: “I don’t jist believe it. I know it.” That was the first thing I ever said to Viridis Monday, I want it recorded here.

  “You have nice eyes,” she remarked. “He said you did.”

  I guess I blushed furiously. “You have better’uns,” I declared.

  Again that smile, and I must have tried to ape it without letting her see my bad teeth again.
She reached out and put her hand lightly on my arm. “You know I’m here to save him,” she said.

  “Here?” was all I could think to say, as if it were here in this house that he was facing that electric chair.

  “Here on earth,” she said.

  I was brave, and I said, “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

  “Would you show me the playhouse?” she asked.

  I had to think about that, I’m sorry to say. Looking back, I should have just nodded my head eagerly and said, “Come on!” But I couldn’t quite yet bring myself to violate so easily a solemn oath, even if I didn’t care a fig for the person I’d made the oath to. So I had to think about it, for a long moment, with the clock a-ticking away on the fireboard. Finally I said, “We swore we’d never tell anybody where it is.”

  “I understand,” she said. And another long minute went by before she said, “Well, maybe you could just describe it to me.”

  I stood up. “No, I’ll take ye. What I swore don’t matter anymore. Not to me, it don’t.” I fetched my wrap and told Momma we’d be back in time for supper.

  We weren’t. It’s a good brisk hike any time of year up the mountainside to the place where that old playhouse leans up against that old basso profundo oak tree. On that late-winter afternoon we had to walk around the snowy places, and she was being extra careful not to get the hem of her fancy dress in the mud. She talked a lot, telling me every little detail of how she’d come to stay with the old woman at Jacob Ingledew’s and how the old woman had let her dress in Sarah’s costume from twenty years before.

  She seemed more impressed with that oak tree than with the playhouse, which was just a pile of lumber anyhow. She stood there looking up at the tree for the longest time. I told her it was a white oak tree. It was over a hundred feet high (I’d climbed it once as far as I could go and measured it with a ball of twine), and it must have been overlooked when they cut nearly every white oak in the county to make staves for whiskey barrels…not for Chism’s Dew but shipped off to the big government distillers in far places like Kentucky. I’m not even sure that tree was on land that belonged to my father, but I knew I owned that tree as much as anybody did.

  “Did you know,” she said quietly, looking up at the great tree, “that Nail thinks trees can sing?”

  I was surprised that she would say it like that, almost as if she didn’t quite believe it herself. It wasn’t till later that I learned she believed it just as fiercely as he did. I was also surprised at what I said myself then: “That makes two of us.”

  “Oh, do you believe it too?” she said, looking at me with delight, as if somehow all this business about singing trees were more important than the question of Nail’s innocence. And then she asked, “Is this tree singing right now?”

  I honestly couldn’t have said that it was, at least I wasn’t hearing anything, but I looked at her as if she were deaf, and said, “Don’t you hear it?” I was just being playful, sort of teasing, but she looked startled and then began listening. When she perked up her ears like that, I did too.

  We heard it.

  Yes, the tree was intoning some sorrowful, deep spiritual, and there is no mistake that what we heard was the tree, but there was another sound in there besides. We listened, and even if the tree’s keening had been our imaginations, because we wanted the tree to sing, that was not the main sound we heard. Because the tree was, I keep saying, a basso profundo, and this sound was more a mezzo-soprano, and it was coming not from the tree but from inside the playhouse.

  I pushed aside the old discarded quilt that served as a doorflap for the playhouse, and I looked inside. There was Rindy, kneeling, head bowed, clutching against her bosom one of our oldest discarded dolls. She was swaying slowly to and fro, rocking the headless and mouldering dollbaby and crooning a sort of lullaby to it. She was wearing an old rag of a coat, a threadbare thing that couldn’t be keeping her warm. Viridis followed me into the playhouse.

  “Miss Monday,” I said, making the introductions, “this here is Dorinda June Whitter.”

  Viridis Monday stayed a whole week in Stay More. Every night, sometimes before dark if she could manage it, she would return the team and buggy to Ingledew’s Livery and then cross the road to Jacob Ingledew’s house and sit up until bedtime talking to the old woman. That ancient dowager would serve a fortified wine from a Spanish town called Jerez. Usually Viridis reported in detail to the woman on what she had achieved during the day, and sometimes the woman would give her advice or at least make commentary on that day’s events and accomplishments. It was the old woman who (out of her experience as social secretary to the state’s first lady) drafted the wording of the petition to the governor, for Viridis to take with her on her rounds of interviewing the citizens of Stay More and some other places in Newton County, for their signatures or their X’s. Surely, I thought, the woman herself would have been the first to sign the petition, but she was not, because, you have to remember, that was still four years before suffrage, four years before that June day when Congress would give women the right to vote or even to sign effective petitions. Except for Dorinda’s, all of the signatures and X’s on Viridis’ petition were men’s…including nine of the original twelve jurymen who had convicted Nail. If she could have found them, she would have had all twelve.

  Viridis invited Dorinda and me to ride with her in the phaeton when she set off for Jasper to hunt up some of the jurymen. It was a Sunday, and sunny, the first really warm day we’d had that year, with the last of the patches of snow melting into the earth; a good day for a drive, without the road too muddy yet. Rindy and I both wore our best; hers was that same white Sears lawn dress she’d worn for the trial, which was out of season for February but all she had that would look good for going into the county seat on a Sunday. She was cheerful. I hadn’t seen her so happy since this whole business had started back in June of the year before. Whatever burden of guilt had been mashing down on her was lifted by the confession she readily gave to Viridis, making a clean breast of it, exonerating poor Nail completely. She wouldn’t yet give Viridis the details of just how Sull Jerram had put her up to it, but she was ready to swear that Nail had never even touched her. She was awfully sorry. She’d had no idea at all that they would take him off and put him in that electric chair and try to kill him. Why, she’d been led to believe the most they’d ever do to him was make him say he was sorry he threatened to sic the federal law on Sull and his courthouse pals.

  The first to put his big John Hancock on Viridis’ petition was Jim Tom Duckworth, who had been Nail’s lawyer before they got rid of him in favor of that Farrell Cobb, and he didn’t have any bitterness for having been dismissed and was a real gentleman about it: he not only signed the petition but wrote out an exact copy of it and put on his hat and coat and went off to get a whole bunch of signatures or X’s himself. He was the one who gave Viridis the names and general addresses of the twelve jurymen. On her own it would have taken the whole week to find just those twelve, scattered as they were, but most of them lived in or near Jasper, and we spent that Sunday tracking them down. By the time Viridis had finished talking with two or three of them, the word had quickly spread and got ahead of us, and some of the jurymen we visited seemed to be expecting us. Some of them claimed they had been mistaken in the first place and had already done changed their minds long ago, and the few who hadn’t, said that all they needed was to hear Rindy say that it weren’t so, and here she was, to say it, if need be.

  We got lost trying to find the jury’s foreman, who lived on the Little Buffalo River up on the north edge of Jasper, and while we were driving around looking for his house we came across an Oldsmobile parked broadside blocking the road. Sitting behind the steering-wheel was Sheriff Duster Snow with three of his deputies there in the vehicle with him, all four men wearing their silver stars pinned to the outside of their overcoats. The sheriff asked Viridis who she was looking for, and she told him, and he said that that individual was not av
ailable. Those were his words. Then he asked did she mind if he had a look at that piece of paper she was carrying around. She showed the petition to him, and he studied it and looked as if he’d like to chew it up and swallow it. He kept throwing fierce looks at Rindy and me. Rindy watched me to see what sort of fierce look I was throwing back at him, and she did a fair job of imitating mine. Finally he passed the petition back to Viridis and bobbed his Adam’s apple a few times and said, “Now lookee yere, ma’am, we caint allow no furriners a-comin in yere and a-stirrin up trouble.” Viridis said she wasn’t a foreigner but an American citizen, a native Arkansawyer. “You aint from Newton County,” Sheriff Snow said, “and this yere aint none of yore business and hit’s again the law to go stirrin up the jurymen such-a-way as this-all, and I don’t aim to stand fer it. Now you better jist git yoreself on back to wharever ye came from, and stay out of this country, if ye know what’s good fer ye.”

  Viridis simply took out her Eagle fountain pen and unscrewed the cap and held the pen out toward the automobile and said, “Would any of you gentlemen like to sign this petition?” and one of the deputies reached out to do it before Sheriff Snow slapped his hand away.

  Later, when we found that lost jury foreman on the Little Buffalo, we got an idea of why the sheriff hadn’t wanted us to find him: not only was he ready to sign the petition, but he wanted to make a confession of his own, that he had never been convinced of Nail’s guilt, that he had tried to hang the jury but had voted with them only after the sheriff had threatened to run him out of the country if he didn’t. Now, if Viridis would let him make a copy of that petition, he knew a good many fellows whose signatures he could obtain. He was still afraid of the sheriff, but he’d just as soon be run out of the country as have to go on the rest of his life feeling bad about sending an innocent man to that electric chair.

  By the time we’d given up trying to locate one more of the jurymen, who’d gone off visiting relatives in Western Grove, it was getting so late in the afternoon that we knew we wouldn’t make it back to Stay More before dark. And we’d be sure to freeze if we tried. So Viridis decided to spend the night at the Buckhorn Hotel, an old landmark in Jasper. Rindy and I would have to miss school Monday, but we didn’t care; we’d never even dreamt of staying at the Buckhorn before, and we were so excited we couldn’t sleep. Viridis had to entertain us past bedtime. She drew our pictures (I’ve still got mine, framed, one of my prized possessions), and she told us stories and descriptions of Paris and her trip around the world.