He enjoyed pretending it was a real interview. “Yeah, quote me as sayin these yere nuns feed me real good; I aint et like this in my whole life.”
“Mr. Bodenhammer,” asked the lady reporter, Viridis, “did Mr. Chism say anything to you about your intended destination?”
“Nome, he never. Tell ye the truth, I never even give it no thought whereabouts I was goin myself. I didn’t aim to light out for Newton County, whar he was a-fixin to go, but I never thought none about goin back home to Stone County neither. I aint got no friends up in them parts.”
“Did he say anything at all to you about his intended route to Newton County? Where and how did he plan to cross the Arkansas River?”
“Ma’am, he never hardly said a thing to me about nothin. I didn’t even know we was breakin out until you—until that there other lady who is his ladyfriend, she told me to be ready. But from the time he come down to git me out of my cell, until we said our good-byes, we never said nothin much atall.”
“I can’t imagine Nail Chism abandoning you like that,” she said.
“Aw, hell, Viridis, I mean, Miss Ma’am, he never abandoned me! I made him do it. I tole him to. It was hopeless, the way I’d done botched up my chance and fell forty feet, a-hittin that pole, and there wasn’t nothin he could do for me. Hell, I had to baig him to save his own skin and leave me alone.”
She put her hand on his cheek, which reporters don’t do. She left it there as she said, “I’m so sorry you didn’t get to go with him.”
“Look at the good side of it,” he said. “I was sposed to die Sat-tidy night, and I’m still alive. People are takin real good keer of me, and I don’t hurt too bad.”
“You won’t be able to draw again for a while,” she observed.
He wiggled the four fingers of his left hand that were not bound in splints or casts. “Didn’t you know I was left-handed?” he said. “I still got some fingers I can draw with.”
“I’ll see to it you get some materials,” she said. “I’ll arrange for you to get all you need to keep on drawing.” She paused. “I’d bring them to you myself, but I…”
He finished it for her, nodding his head to say yes, he knew. “You’re takin off for Newton County,” he said quietly.
She raised her chin into a modest nod. And then she did something that reporters don’t even think of doing: she bent down and kissed him lightly on the mouth.
“You’uns live happy ever after,” he said.
“You too” was all she could say.
Taking leave of her father was not quite as easy: he insisted on going with them to the train station. When she protested, he observed that from the looks of all the luggage she was taking with her, she intended to stay for quite some time.
“I’ll be back,” she said.
“But I doubt she will,” he said, indicating Dorinda. “I’d just appreciate the honor of seeing you two ladies off.”
So he went with them to the station. Viridis had made arrangements to have Rosabone transported on the same train, which would involve two transfers: one at Van Buren, from the Iron Mountain to the Frisco, and another, at Fayetteville, to the Frisco’s spur toward Pettigrew. Cyril Monday took the morning off from his job at the bank to see them catch their train.
At the station he drew her apart from Dorinda for a moment to ask, “You got all the money you need?”
What kind of question was that? For several years now, since her return from Europe, she had not been required to depend upon her father for any assistance beyond a place to live. “Enough,” she said.
“Never can tell what emergencies might come up,” he said. “My daddy always told me, you never know when you might meet some fellow selling two elephants for a nickel.”
She remembered Tom Fletcher’s old jokes about elephants in the Ozarks. This time Tom Fletcher hadn’t made any jokes, except one, of sorts: if she ever wanted to write a column called “An Arkansawyer in Stay More,” he had told her, he would pay their usual rate for it. When she had only smiled, not laughed, he had prompted, “It’s nearly as remote as Yokohama to me.” She had told him he ought to visit her there sometime.
She told her father, “Thank you, Daddy, I’ve got all I need.”
“Just never can tell,” he said. “Here,” and he thrust a roll of bills into her hand. “Put this in your purse and forget about it until you need it.” She tried to protest, but he touched his finger to her lips. “Better take it now instead of having to ask me for it later, when I might be in a bad mood.”
He had a point there. She put the thick roll of bills into her purse. “You’re sweet,” she said.
“I hope you’ll remember me that way,” he requested. And he had one other request: “Cyrilla wanted me to ask you, she said she couldn’t ask you herself, but if it’s okay with you and you don’t think you’ll need it anymore, can she have that studio of yours up in the north tower?”
Viridis raised her eyebrows. “Does she want to take up art?”
“Sewing. She wants me to buy her a sewing machine.”
Viridis smiled. “None of y’all expect me to come back, do you?”
“From the looks of it, no,” her father said, and then he moved back to where Dorinda stood, to tell the girl that he had enjoyed having her stay at his house and was sorry they hadn’t got better acquainted. He wished her a pleasant trip and good luck and a long and happy life.
“BOART!” hollered the conductor, and the three said their good-byes and exchanged hugs.
Viridis Monday left Little Rock.
Take any day in June in Stay More. School’s been out awhile, Mr. Perry the schoolteacher has left town to find a summer job in Harrison, the crops have been planted and are growing, nothing is ready to harvest yet except the snap beans and first spinach, nobody is really busy except the men cutting the hay and the timberjacks who keep on logging into ever more remote stands of the white oak forests.
My father never lost a chance to tell us girls that when school let out he expected us to help more on the farm, but every year school let out and he couldn’t seem to find enough to keep us busy. He complained to Ma and anybody else who would listen that if he’d only had him just one boy to help around the place, instead of all three of us worthless girls, he might be able to turn the farm into a cash proposition. As it was, he could only raise enough to feed us. We weren’t starving, not by any means, but we never had any cash money.
As the youngest of the three unwanted girls, I felt least wanted, so I tried hardest to help out around the place. While Barb and Mandy wouldn’t have been caught dead doing a lick of work outside the walls of the house itself, I got myself the job of tending the garden patch. I wouldn’t let a weed grow loose in that garden patch, and I spent a good bit of my summer out there in the broiling sun, underneath my sunbonnet but my dress all soaked through with sweat. I was pretty young when I discovered something important about the way the brain works: your thoughts are always better, more interesting, more lively, while you’re working than while you’re just sitting. I knew that the worst part of Nail Chism’s experience in the penitentiary was all the hours he had to do his thinking just sitting or lying around: the thoughts he had in those times must have been drab shades of gray.
Take any day in late June in Stay More and it’s apt to be real hot. Generally, I’d try to get my garden work done right after sunup, without even waiting for breakfast. There would still be dew glistening on the vines and sogging the greens. The dog Rouser would trot behind me out to the garden, which wasn’t but as far as from here to there the other side of what passed for Paw’s barn, and Rouser would just sit and watch me, or the morning birds, while I chopped weeds out of the garden. Then he would go with me afterward up in the holler behind our house, just a quarter-mile or so, to the falls. It wasn’t really a waterfall; it didn’t fall more than maybe five feet from the ledge to the pool; it was more of a cascade than a waterfall, but I called it the falls, and I was the only one in the family w
ho used it. Barb and Mandy drew just enough water from the well to fill an oaken sitz tub about once a week, Saturday evening usually before they stepped out, and they’d share that water, Barb first because she was oldest and because she’d drawn the water, and stand, not sitz, in the tub and splash enough to get off the worst dirt and smells. But me, take an early morning in June in Stay More and you’d find me getting wet all over beneath my little waterfall up the holler. No, you’d not; because neither you nor anybody knew where I was, and I was stark naked and only a little bit uncomfortable that Rouser, who was watching me, was a male.
If anybody or anything had come along and spied on me, Rouser would’ve barked. He never did. And also, I took my .22 rifle with me, just in case. Not that I was afraid, being back up in that dark, mossy, woodsy holler. It was real cool after a couple hours of chopping weeds out of the garden patch, and the water that trickled over that ledge was almost cold.
Of course I never stood under that waterfall when I was having my monthlies. Everybody knew that would be a terrible thing to do, almost suicide. Anybody could tell you of a fool girl or two who had got tuberculosis or a stroke of paralysis from taking a bath at the wrong time of her month.
I have been called superstitious, but I know some things which have never been known to fail. This is not boasting but observation. There are plants that work wonders and always have for thousands of years. I never got chiggerbit, because I knew where the penny-royal grew, and I rubbed it on my legs, and when the chiggers were chewing my sisters alive, they didn’t bother me at all. Now, is that superstition?
Take the common mullein, which some folks call the velvet plant because of its velvety leaves, a shade of green so pale you’d think the plant was worthless. And it is, for most things; cows won’t eat it, and although I’ve heard of some outlandish remedies concocted from the seeds, I’ve never known one that honestly works. The mullein stalk grows straight up, sometimes as tall as eight or nine feet. The yellow flowers are small and moderately ornamental, and I’ve known a few folks’ yards where they let the mullein grow just for decoration.
In late June the mullein hasn’t even started to flower, and at most it’s just a few feet high, and inconspicuous, and totally worthless…except for this: if somebody, or something, is lost, you can name a mullein plant after him, her, or it, and then bend the stalk down to the ground. Likely, it will stay bent down. It will surely stay bent down and keep on growing that way if the lost person or the lost thing remains lost. But if that mullein stalk straightens back up, the lost will be found.
This never fails. At least, I have never known it to fail, and I have lost a lot of things: recovered some and never found the others.
Because somebody who has left Stay More is, in a way, “lost,” the mullein is also good for letting you know if they are ever coming back. When I saw the first mullein of June that was tall enough to bend down, on my hike back up into the holler to my bathing-place, I named it Viridis and bent it down. Not too long after that, another mullein started growing tall right near it. I bent that one down too, after naming it Nail.
Each morning, after two or three sweaty hours in the garden, I would hike up to the waterfall to clean up, and I would pause to notice that both mullein stalks were still bent down. I would greet them and tell them I hoped they would straighten up.
When I had bathed and put on a fresh dress, I would mosey on down into the village and hang around Ingledew’s store at the time of morning when everybody was there to get their mail. I never got any mail, except from Viridis. But she never wrote to tell me exactly when she was coming.
The men would sit on the furniture of Ingledew’s storeporch like it belonged to them. The women and girls would have to stand around, not on the porch but off to one side, or out in the road, or sometimes inside the store around the dry goods, which was an exciting place to be, especially after Willis Ingledew received a new shipment of bolts of cloth, clean and bright and smooth. Nothing smells better than fresh cloth. But while I enjoyed hanging around the dry-goods department, more often I stood outside off the edge of the porch near enough to the men to listen to their stories or their talk about current events. The main current event now was Nail’s escape. How long would it take him to get home? There was no doubt in any man’s mind that he was coming home; there were only two questions: how long did it take a feller to walk from Little Rock to Stay More if he was careful not to let himself get seen? and how soon after coming back to Stay More would Nail do something to Sull Jerram?
Every man was of the opinion that Nail would do something to Sull Jerram. If he didn’t kill him, he’d mutilate him beyond recognition or something equally terrible, and Sull knew it, and the men who’d been to Jasper lately reported that Sull was…I thought they said “scared spitless” and figured they meant he was so frightened he couldn’t work up enough saliva inside his mouth to take a decent spit, because a man in that predicament was practically unmanned. From my observation, every male human being above the age of twelve or thirteen had to be able to spit at least once every fifteen minutes or he risked being mistaken for a female.
I had to watch where I was standing when I eavesdropped on the porch loungers; I had to be ready to jump to one side quickly.
I told nobody about my mullein stalks. You don’t ever tell, which would break the magic. Nobody in Stay More except me, and I suppose the old woman who lived at Jacob Ingledew’s (although her house was directly across the road from Willis’ store, she hardly ever crossed the road; I never saw her), knew that Viridis might return to Stay More any day now.
One morning in late June on my way to the waterfall after working in the garden, I paused to observe the two mullein stalks and noticed that one of them, the one I’d named Viridis, was behaving like a pecker ready for love. I was so excited I could scarcely take time to go on to the falls and take off all my clothes and get real wet. Later, on my way to the store, and at the store itself, I couldn’t understand why all the rest of the world, except that mullein stalk, remained so normal and unexcited. It was a typical dull, slow morning in Stay More. The mail wagon came out from Jasper, and Willis Ingledew sorted the mail, and folks saw what they got and read it, or read it for those who couldn’t read, and I didn’t get anything, but I didn’t need anything, because I knew she was coming!
And sure enough, she came! Mullein stalks are never wrong. That very morning, while we were all still there, in or on or around the Ingledew store, the twenty-odd porch regulars loafing in their chairs or on their kegs and keeping the dust of the road down with their spitting, ankle-deep in the shavings from their pocketknives, the children playing in the road without fear of traffic, for there was none, the women mostly inside around the dry goods, and myself leaning up against one of the posts that held up the corner of the porch roof, a slow-moving wagon came into view, coming not from Jasper but from the schoolhouse road that goes westward up the mountain toward Sidehill, Eden, and places beyond. There was an additional horse tied behind the wagon, trotting briskly. I think I recognized that horse, or mare, before I recognized the passengers in the wagon. I could tell by her gait. It was Rosabone.
I let out a yell. Everybody turned to stare at me briefly before returning their gazes toward the distantly approaching wagon. To the few who continued staring at me, I explained my outburst: “It’s Viridis. She’s here.” Then I started running toward the wagon. I was barefoot, as I always am when the weather’s warm, and the gravels of the road bit into my pounding feet, but I scarcely noticed. Rouser chased after me and commenced barking. Other dogs picked up his cry.
So there was a great hubbub as Viridis returned to Stay More. As soon as I started running, others followed me, not all of them running but moving as fast as they could to keep up with me. We didn’t give the wagon a chance to arrive and stop at its destination, whatever its destination was: I still don’t know whether Viridis had told the driver she wanted to go to Ingledew’s store, the old woman’s house, my house, or th
e Chisms’, or the Whitters’, or where. We stopped her right there in the road. Rindy jumped down from the wagon like she expected a big hug from all of us at once, but it was Viridis I hugged first, and then I hugged Rindy, and the way other people were hugging Viridis, she might have been kinfolks and long lost…or at least the heroine that all of us knew her to be.
Women were exclaiming, “Did ye ever!” and “I swan!” and “Lawsy sakes!” and men were saying, “I’ll be a son of a gun!” and “Wal, dog my cats!” and “What d’ye know about that!”
Then all the commotion ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and it was absolutely silent for a time, so quiet you could hear the trees behind Willis’ store whispering. Waymon Chism broke the silence by declaring, “He aint showed up yit.” We all knew who “he” was.
Viridis had been smiling that great smile that made her mouth look so pretty, but now she frowned and bit her lip. Then she said, “Well.” That’s all that was said for a while by anybody, although they were all looking at one another and exchanging expressions. Then Viridis declared, “We’ll just have to wait for him, won’t we?” In response there was a chorus of men’s and women’s declarations: “He’ll turn up” and “Give him time” and “Any day now” and “Shore as shootin” and “You bet ye” and “Shore thang.”
The Choiring Of The Trees Page 38
