The Choiring Of The Trees

by Donald Harington

  “Tell you what. See that water tower up yonder? We’ll just climb up on that, and y’all drive under real slow, and we’ll look into each of the cars that way, and if we see anybody, we’ll wave you down.”

  The voices stopped. Nail cautiously raised his eyes above the side of the car. The brakeman was heading for the caboose, and the three men were going the other way, toward the water tank. Soon the engine puffed steam and the train lurched and began to move. Nail climbed over the opposite side of the car, hung from the ladder for a moment, watching the tracks in both directions, then jumped down to the roadbed and tumbled into a ditch. He clambered into a stand of weeds and crawled low a good distance from the tracks before he stood up and got as far away from them as he could.

  But he continued in the direction of the tracks, because it was a generally northwestward course and that was his inclination. He hiked up through Copperas Gap, keeping the tracks in view, but when he reached the point where they veered sharply westward, he began to think that he ought to abandon his plan to take the train part of the way home. And his sense of direction, which kept wanting to turn north toward home, disliked the train’s westerly course. He wanted to get across the Arkansas River and up into the Ozarks. Once in the Ozarks, even the foothills, he would feel as if he were back in his own country, and that would give him strength to walk another week, if need be, to reach Stay More.

  Just to the north of Copperas Gap is a place where the Arkansas River, plunging southward and running into a mountain, narrows dramatically and bends eastward. It is one of the river’s narrowest passages in Arkansas, and it was there, probably, that Nail decided to cross.

  In trying to find that spot on my map, I was astonished to discover something very strange: that the hamlet, or settlement, or maybe just a riverbank landing, on the north shore of the Arkansas River, where the current would take him or his body after his attempted crossing at Copperas Gap, was named Nail. Yes, that’s what the map said. Now, from my years as postmistress of Stay More and my many dealings with the Post Office Department, I know that two towns of the same name in the same state can’t both keep their name very long, and that we already had a town named Nail in Newton County, although in that year, 1915, it wasn’t a post office yet and wasn’t shown on that same map that showed Nail as a town in the southern part of Conway County, due south of Plumerville, on the Arkansas River. I doubt very much there’s anything left of that Nail now, but it was there then. And that’s more or less where Nail was headed. Maybe it had been founded by distant kinsmen of his. And maybe it had already passed into oblivion, being one of those river towns, like storied Cadron downstream and legendary Spadra upstream, which had once been busy but were now dead. Or maybe, I sometimes think, it existed only as a locale on a map, a name just to show me that this was where Nail would have landed.

  He stood on the south bank and measured the river’s breadth with his eye, its narrowness at this point compared with its broadening expanse downstream. Just recently, in late May, the river had flooded severely, and now, in June, although the water level had dropped and the banks were more or less back in their original locations, the river was still wide and swift and roiling brown, cluttered with debris.

  But Nail was an excellent swimmer. He had swum the Buffalo several times when that wilderness river was at its worst. On calmer pools he had raced his brothers and the friends of his youth, and had never lost. He could swim better and faster on his back than most people could on their bellies. He could swim in the pitch dark…although it was still before sundown when he entered the river. In fact, it was just about the time of day that Saturday they would have been coming to take him to another appointment with Old Sparky.

  He was aware of this, and he knew that if that had happened, with just him against all of them, his chances would have been slight. Now it was just him against the river, and he was free and proud. Oh, he was foolhardy too, and hungry and tired and weak. And he did not know that no man, however good a swimmer, had ever swum the Arkansas at Copperas Gap when it was as swift as this.

  But he was almost sure he could swim that river.

  Off

  When she decided to take Rosabone for that run out to Pinnacle, it was to prepare the both of them for a return to Stay More. And her insomnia had been worse than any night since that night before the governor was going to let her (or make her, he thought) get into Nail’s cell. She needlessly rose from bed more than once and climbed up to her studio to recheck the contents of the canvas bag she had prepared for Nail and Ernest, to make sure she had remembered it all and to try to determine if anything else might come in handy.

  What if they needed a compass? How about a few yards of mosquito netting? Maybe a bar of soap? Could they use some salt and pepper casters? A pocket watch? At one point in the wee hours she suddenly realized that she had forgotten an important item: matches! They would need to build a fire, if not to keep warm, to cook. She tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen and wrapped a handful of sulphur matches in oilcloth and added them to the other items in the canvas bag, which once again she inspected and checked off her list. Maybe she ought to include a box of raisins. Did Nail and Ernest like raisins?

  At sunrise she gave up brooding about the contents of the canvas bag and realized that it would be useless to try to sleep any longer. She got up and dressed, almost automatically donning her riding habit without realizing that was what she intended to do: take Rosabone out to Pinnacle and back. She did not bother with breakfast. She took a few of her own cookies from the cookie jar and an apple for Rosabone.

  She rode hard out and harder coming back. “We’ve got to get in shape, Rose girl,” she explained to the horse. “We’re going back to Stay More. You liked it there, didn’t you? Well, we’re going back again in just a few more days.”

  Usually when she rode out to Pinnacle, she would rest the mare and herself at the foot of the mountain for a while before returning to town. She told herself this time to take it easy, that she wouldn’t need to start for the sycamore southwest of the penitentiary until midafternoon at the earliest, but she was too impatient and eager. If nothing else, she could spend the rest of the day finishing her letter to Nail, which she would enclose in the canvas bag, even if it was already too long and, she feared, too candid.

  She scarcely gave Rosabone time to dry her sweat before heading back for town. More than once she met or passed an auto painted with the insignia of the Pulaski County Sheriff or the Little Rock Police, and more than once an officer waved at her; one time a deputy honked his horn at her before waving. They all grinned as if they would like to give chase but had more important things to do. She did not think there was anything unusual about so many lawmen being on the roads on Saturday morning, but later she would remember them.

  When she returned to her house, her father was sitting on the porch in his favorite wicker chair, reading the Gazette, as he always did Saturdays and Sundays. He motioned her to sit in the wicker chair next to his, but she said, “No, thank you, Daddy. I’ve got an awful lot to do today.”

  “Meeting someone?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not meeting anyone.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked, and then he turned the paper so that she could see the front page. There was her original drawing of Nail, with his head shaved for his first appointment with the chair, with a caption: NOTED CONVICT WHO MADE ESCAPE. Her eyes shifted to the headline to the left of it: NAIL CHISM SCALES WALLS AT ‘PEN’ AND ESCAPES. Viridis snatched the paper out of her father’s hands and sat down with it in the other wicker chair.

  There were no fewer than four subheadlines, one right under the other: NOTED NEWTON COUNTY MAN, CONVICTED RAPIST PREPARED THREE TIMES FOR ELECTRIC CHAIR, TAKES FRENCH LEAVE, and the second one: ACCOMPLICE IN ESCAPE, YOUNG BODENHAMMER, THWARTED AND CAUGHT, and the third one: $100 REWARD OFFERED FOR CHISM’S RECAPTURE, and the fourth one: NEWTON COUNTY ALERTED; FULL MANHUNT PROMISED.

  The accompanying story pointed out
that Nail Chism was only the second man ever to escape from The Walls since it was erected; but the first one, J.F. McCabe, had made his escape long before the recent “improvements” that had supposedly rendered the prison escape-proof.

  The article even carried a reference to her, not by name, in its fifth paragraph: “A Little Rock woman who had conducted a long campaign to liberate Chism, whom she felt had been unjustly accused of the crime, will be sought for questioning later today by the sheriff’s office.”

  “Well, thanks for warning me!” Viridis said aloud.

  “I wasn’t warning you,” her father protested. “That story has already done it.”

  “I was talking to the story,” Viridis said. She resumed listening to it; it told her that Ernest Bodenhammer was in St. Vincent’s Infirmary, where doctors had been required to place most of his body in a plaster cast. It was feared that he might be permanently paralyzed, although his neck was not broken. Apparently, he had sustained his injuries in an attempt to imitate Chism’s successful leap from the top of the prison wall to a power pole. While Chism had evidently slid down the pole to freedom, the youth, only sixteen, had missed the jump and fallen to the ground.

  “Oh, damn!” Viridis said.

  “Where are you meeting him?” her father asked.

  “St. Vincent’s Infirmary,” Viridis answered.

  “Not him,” her father said. “Not the boy. Aren’t you meeting the man somewhere today? Or is it the boy you’re really interested in?”

  “Daddy, listen, I’ve got to—” she started to tell her father, but they were interrupted. Two autos pulled to a stop in front of the Monday house. The first one contained two men she recognized, Sheriff Bill Hutton and Warden T.D. Yeager, and the second one carried one man she recognized, a reporter from the Gazette.

  These men, followed by several others, climbed the high front yard and the high porch of the Monday mansion. The sheriff spoke first: “Good morning, ma’am, and Mr. Monday. I see y’all have done already read the paper.” Neither of them responded, although her father nodded when the sheriff said to him, “We’ve got to ask the young lady a few questions, if it’s okay with you.”

  They asked her more than a few questions. But she maintained, truthfully, that she had not expected Nail Chism’s escape. Of course she felt that his conviction and incarceration were wrongful, and he certainly deserved to be out of prison, but she knew nothing about his escape other than what she had just this moment read in the newspaper. She was aware that he had been imprisoned and tormented by the threat of death as long as he could stand it, so she could certainly understand how he might be desperate for freedom on the eve of an unprecedented fourth attempt at executing him; but still, his escape came as a total surprise to her.

  “You have no idea where he might of could gone?” the sheriff asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” she said.

  “Ma’am, my guess,” the sheriff said, “is that you just might be hiding him up in your house somewheres. Mind if we look?” He addressed this question to her father, not to her.

  And her father, bless his heart, said, “No, but you will have to get yourselves a search warrant to go into my house.”

  “We done already thought of that, sir,” the sheriff said, pulling the search warrant out of his hip pocket and showing it to her father and then to her. She felt some panic. Would they find the canvas bag? Or, for all she knew, maybe they would find Nail: maybe he had reconsidered her offer to hide him in her attic and had already hidden himself up there. She did not want these men to go into her house. The sheriff looked at her again and said, “If you’ll just lead the way, ma’am.”

  Her mother and Cyrilla and Dorinda were having breakfast in the kitchen, and the servants, Ruby and Sam, were also there, and the lawmen just said, “Excuse us,” and went in and out of the kitchen quickly, and spent little time on the first floor of the house before heading for the stairs. They gave only a perfunctory search to the bedrooms and closets of the second floor before the sheriff asked her father, “Where do those doors go?” Her father explained that one door led to the attic storeroom, and the other two led to the south turret playroom and the north turret, where Viridis had her studio. The sheriff instructed his deputies to split up and try all three doors. He himself would accompany her up the north turret stairs, to her studio.

  There were no closets or cubbies or hiding-places in her studio. Just her easels and her supplies and the cabinet in which she kept her drawings, its flat drawers much too narrow to conceal anybody, but the sheriff pulled them out anyway, one by one, and asked, “What’s all this stuff?”

  “Do you mind?” she said, not answering him. “You won’t find Nail Chism in there.”

  The sheriff moved around the room, looking at its contents; he studied her most recent painting on its easel, a winter landscape of Stay More done from her sketches. She expected him to ask her if that was the village of Stay More, but apparently he did not recognize it as a village or as a landscape. His glance moved onward and came to rest upon the canvas bag, loosely closed atop her table. He picked it up, hefted it, asked, “Mind if I look in this?” and started to open it.

  She did not have to lose her temper; it lost itself. “Sheriff Hutton! You have a warrant to search for a man, not to pry into my personal effects!” She lowered her voice: “Especially not items of…of feminine hygiene.”

  “Of which? Oh.” The sheriff blushed and gingerly replaced the bag. “Sorry,” he said. He moved on around the room. “Never can tell,” he said. He headed for the stairs and went back down.

  As the men were leaving the house, having satisfied themselves that she was not hiding Nail Chism, Warden Yeager said to her, “You’ll let us know hee hee if you run acrost his pawmarks hee hee, won’t you?”

  “Don’t count on it hee hee,” she said.

  The warden gave her a wounded look as if she had failed to return a favor. Come to think of it, she realized after the men were gone, she had.

  They would not let her see Ernest at St. Vincent’s. She had to wait at the hospital and speak with the mother superior to request permission and explain that, while not related to Ernest Bodenhammer, she was the only person who had visited him regularly in the penitentiary. The mother superior was kind and considerate but had to inform Viridis that Ernest was under guard and also under heavy sedation. Possibly, Viridis could see him tomorrow, but she would need written permission from Warden T.D. Yeager.

  All the rest of that day she stayed in the newsrooms of the Gazette. If any word came in of Nail’s having been spotted or recaptured, or anything at all, she could learn it faster in the newspaper office. Tom Fletcher did not mind her being there, but he advised her that several days might pass before any news developed.

  And he was right. Many days would pass before she heard the first rumor that any trace of Nail had been seen, and even that would turn out to be a false lead. She was impatient to get on to Newton County and wait for him there. She had anticipated, when she planned to leave the canvas bag for him, departing Little Rock herself within a few days to go back to Stay More. She had been in correspondence with both me and the old woman in the Jacob Ingledew house who had been her friend and hostess during her previous visit to Stay More.

  I had kept her informed of the swelling local sentiment against Judge Sewell Jerram and his gang. Strangely, his crony Judge Lincoln Villines remained popular enough to be touted as a possible candidate for governor (only in the event his friend George Hays chose not to seek reelection), but Sull himself was so unwelcome that a joke went the rounds about his having to pay Duster Snow time-and-a-half overtime wages to serve as his personal bodyguard. The good sheriff we’d had before Snow, W.J. Pruitt, had let everybody know that he intended to oppose Snow in the November election, and almost everybody planned to vote for him.

  Viridis had written me to ask if I thought it was safe for Dorinda to return home. The school term in Little Rock had already come to a close w
hen Nail escaped, and Dorinda was honestly homesick, or that’s what Viridis said; I had sort of been hoping that Rindy herself might write and tell me how much she missed us, but I suppose her penmanship lessons hadn’t got that far. I had told Viridis, after asking the advice of my parents, Rindy’s parents, and even John Ingledew, that Sull would have killed Rindy by now to silence her if he was ever going to do it; besides, the man was smart enough to realize that the point had long since passed beyond which her silence meant anything at all. He probably wished she did not exist and wished even more that she had never existed, but there wasn’t much likelihood he would be any further threat to her. Bring her home, I said.

  Now Viridis was ready to do just that. She had taken Rindy out and bought her a fancy suitcase to take all of her nice new clothes and belongings back home with her. She did not intend to return Rindy to Stay More by the same means she had taken her out: riding double on Rosabone. No, she was going to arrange for a wagon in Pettigrew to meet their train and take them and their luggage (she was bringing more than one trunk herself, and hatboxes), with Rosabone tied behind, the miles across the mountains to Stay More.

  I knew she was coming. But I did not know that Nail had escaped. That news didn’t reach us at all until the following Thursday, when we read it in the local newspaper. On the second page of the Jasper Disaster, under a small headline, nail chism makes his escape, was a brief condensation of the same story that had appeared in the Gazette five days before, now stale and unstirring. Remember, we had no telephones in Newton County, no electricity; all we had was the U.S. Mail, which wasn’t even the Pony Express. Later Viridis would apologize for not having written us a letter, which would have arrived several days before the newspaper. She had been too busy to think of it.

  She was busy trying to get in to see Ernest without written permission from T.D. Yeager, who at that point wouldn’t have given her permission to breathe. On the third day after Nail’s escape, Tom Fletcher “smuggled” her into Ernest’s room as a Gazette reporter, and she was permitted to “interview” the boy for half an hour. He was awake and fairly cheerful, all things considered: all things such as having nearly every bone in his body broken: compound fractures of both arms and one leg, eight broken ribs, six broken fingers, a cracked pelvis, and a dislocated hip. Miraculously, his whole spinal column from neck to tailbone remained undamaged, and he would not be permanently paralyzed, as had been feared at first, although at the moment, and for the next six weeks, he wouldn’t be going anywhere, not even back to the penitentiary.