The Choiring Of The Trees

by Donald Harington

  But as Nail kicked the bear with his foot and prepared to plunge the knife into it, the bear made one last defense, raking a claw into Nail’s leg.

  When the bear had become at last motionless, Nail realized he had blood covering his face and more of it running down his ankle, and he had to stop his own bleeding before he could bleed the bear any further.

  Later he dragged the bear’s carcass into the mouth of a cavern, or undercut bluff ledge, in Dave Millsaps Hollow, where he was almost too tired to build a fire and butcher the bear and roast some of its meat. While the bear meat was cooking on a spit over the coals, he settled down to prepare the bear’s hide, although there was so much of it, the thick furry hide, that he couldn’t conceive how he would need it for anything in such hot weather. But the bear’s fur seemed more important to him than the meat; he was not particularly fond of bear meat, and he kept telling himself that he had only shot the bear in self-defense.

  But if he wondered what earthly use he might have for a thick bearskin, he would soon discover a desperate need for it: the next morning he awoke before sunrise, feeling severely cold. He jumped up and attempted to warm himself by hopping around and clapping himself, and then built up his fire and held himself close to it, and then added more and more fuel until it was blazing and roaring, and then wrapped the bearskin tight around himself, but still it was awful cold! He could not understand: the sun had risen and the day looked just as bright and hot as any late-June day ought to be, but here he was freezing! There was nothing in the appearance of Nature to indicate that the temperature of the air had actually dropped so drastically. He considered that there might be a cold draft blowing up from some hidden crevice inside the cavern, and he moved out into the sunshine, surrounded by warm air in the morning sun, but still he began to shiver; then, increasingly, to tremble helplessly. He lay down beside his roaring fire wrapped tight in both his deerskin and his bearskin and shook so violently that he felt his chattering teeth would knock themselves out of his mouth, that every bone of his body would splinter.

  His terrible chill lasted for almost an hour and then abruptly stopped, and he scarcely had time to catch his breath before he became overheated. He threw off the deerskin and bearskin and crawled away from the blazing fire into the cool recesses of the cavern, but still he felt as if he were burning up. He was tempted to hike down into the holler to search for a stream of cool water to immerse himself in, but he lacked the strength to hike because the awful heat seemed to be afflicting his brain and his energy; he felt of his forehead: it was still caked with blood from the bear’s blow, but the skin was hotter than any fever he had ever had. He considered that possibly he had not cleaned and stanched his wounds well enough to prevent infection, but even the worst infection would not so suddenly give him a high fever. Would it?

  His fever continued to immobilize him in agony for several hours, for most of the morning, and then, sometime in the afternoon, he began to drip with sweat. Hot as he had been all morning, he could not understand why he had not sweated during the morning, but it was afternoon before the cooling perspiration began to form in his pores and then gradually to soak him and his clothes. He wondered which of the three conditions was worse: to freeze, to burn, to sog. The same bear fur that had warmed him he now used to blot up some of the flood of lather from his skin until the fur had become as soggy as he was.

  Was it beginning to darken so soon? The day was ending, and he had accomplished nothing except the helpless attention to his changes in temperature: first too cold, then too hot, now too wet, but now also too weak to do anything but lie upon the floor of the cave and collect his wits and try to imagine what had happened. This was not, he assured himself, the fever of an infection from the bear’s wounding him. Had he eaten something bad? Had the bear meat contained some poison? Or had he perhaps unknowingly been bitten by a poisonous snake or reptile?

  He got himself painfully up from the hard earth to search for his bota, and found it, but the goatskin bottle was empty. Had he drunk it dry during his fever? He stepped outside the cavern to begin a hike in search of water but realized he could not go anywhere; he was not just weak but increasingly dizzy. His head began to spin. Darkness was falling, not just from the setting of the sun but from something inside his head.

  He fell to his knees and remained thus for a long time, he did not know how long: too tired to stand but too proud to fall over. His vision clouded. Then he saw the bed. The bed! Right over there in one corner of the cavern. How had he missed it before? Well, it wasn’t any four-poster or even any kind of bedstead as such, but it was a neat stack of quilts and blankets and comforters and pillows, and even had some fresh white sheets on it! Somebody had made a bed inside the cavern. He crawled to it and heaved his body up onto it and felt his body sinking into it, and it was the most comfortable bed he’d ever been in, even if it didn’t have any springs or slats or frame or anything but just this thick pile of stuffings. His hand gripped the white sheet with wonder, and then, gripping it further, he discovered that he was also gripping paper. Not just a white sheet of cloth but a white sheet of paper. He picked it up and had to hold it very close to his eyes to make out that it had letters written on it.

  He squinted and managed to make out: Dear you (I cannot write your name for fear somebody else might find this), I have been coming to this cavern every day in hopes of finding you here, and I have prepared this bed for you, bringing each time I came a blanket or two, and these pillows, one for you, one I hope for me, this bed for us, when you come here. You will come here, won’t you? I know you will, it is just a matter of time, but as I write these words two weeks have passed since I came to Stay More and began to wait for you, and you have not come. This is the place that Latha said you would come to. I hope. Please come. If you are reading these words, it means you are here, and it means I will soon be with you. Lie still. Be here. The trees will sing for you until I join you. With all my love, The Lady. And there was a P.S.: Your new harmonica is under this bed.

  How could this be? Although Nail had had only the rising and setting sun as his compass, and had known that he was pointed in the right direction, he had a good idea of how far Newton County was from Little Rock, and there was simply no way he could already have reached it; he had to be still somewhere in Pope County, northeastern Pope County by his calculation, with maybe fifty miles, three or four days’ travel, separating him from Stay More.

  But now he groped beneath the pile of blankets and quilts until his hand touched metal, and he withdrew the harmonica: an M. Hohner Marine Band Tremolo Echo, identical to the one he’d had for years and had destroyed to make a dagger. He raised it to his mouth and kissed it, and then he began to play it, and he played it through the dark hours of the night until the trees, roused from their slumber, joined their voices to his music.

  Then was it morning? Or did she appear with a lantern? Or was it neither morning nor lantern but her own light, the light that emanated from her goodness? He opened his eyes, realizing he had not slept but having no idea how long he had lain with his eyes closed: he opened his eyes and there she was, kneeling beside the bed she had made for him. She was smiling but also frowning: she was shocked at his appearance, at the blood on his face from the bear’s clawing him mixed with the red of the berry juice and his two-week growth of beard.

  You made it! she said. But are you all right?

  “I reckon not,” he said. “I must be real bad sick, ’cause I don’t have the least idee how I managed to git here.”

  She felt his brow. You’re real cold, she said. Cold as death.

  “Yeah, I’ve been either too cold or too hot or too wet for quite a spell.” These words came out almost like stuttering, because of the chattering of his teeth and the trembling of his body.

  Before he could protest that he looked awful and smelled worse, she climbed beneath the covers with him and held him tight and attempted to warm him. The thick quilts and coverlets piled atop them imprisoned her body hea
t and divided it with him, but that was not enough for both of them: she became cold herself. Together they trembled for a long time until each of them removed or parted enough of their clothing to make contact and penetration possible, and the pleasure of the contact and the penetration was so great as to make them oblivious to any cold or sickness or loneliness, and they continued it even beyond the point where they ceased being too cold and became too hot, beyond that to the point where they were both drenched with sweat, as well as the bed, and still neither of them reached the endpoint of the exertion.

  Finally they had to stop, and they lay panting in a pile of wet bedclothes. She was the first to speak: I guess you can’t get over the mountain.

  He observed, “You caint either.”

  Let’s rest, she said. Let’s nap and then try again.

  He napped. More than napped: he fell into a deep sleep without knowing that he slept, then fell out of a deep sleep without knowing that he had never slept, then discovered that he was neither shaking with cold nor melting with heat nor dripping with wet but had resumed a stable temperature and humidity. Light came from the mouth of the cavern, with full sunshine in it. There was no bed. If he had somehow got through the night without sleep, it had happened upon the bare earthen floor of the cavern: his arms and face were caked with dirt.

  He had no energy whatever, not even enough to heed the urge to make water. He rolled over to one side, opened his fly, and urinated upon the dirt beneath him, shifting his body to avoid the dark puddle. He had no hunger but did have a mighty thirst; he recalled that he’d had it the previous evening but had done nothing about it, and now it was worse. He managed to get to his knees and crawl to where the bota lay, but discovered that it was empty and remembered that he had already tried it and found it empty. He attached the bota to his belt on one side and attached his hunting-knife in its sheath to the other side, donned his three furs, the coonskin cap, the deerskin cape, the damp bearskin robe, and then took up his bow and three remaining arrows and left the cavern. Downhill from it he looked back at it, and stared long at it as if he half-expected that she might appear, and then he gave his head a vigorous shake to clear it and staggered on down and out of the hollow and into the middle fork of the Illinois Bayou, where he removed his clothing and his furs and lay in the water for a long, long time.

  Just soaking all that dirt from his body lifted his spirits, and afterward, resuming his hike, he felt lighter, light enough even to make a joke about it to himself: “I ought to feel lighter; I’ve washed off ten pounds of dirt.” He even laughed, and his laughter helped him begin to climb the mountain ahead, which, before the morning was over, would be the hardest mountain he’d ever climbed, although it couldn’t have been very high. He spent nearly all the morning on his hands and knees, or rising enough from his knees to lurch upward and grab a sapling trunk to pull himself another foot higher. He reflected that if he had been totally well, he could have stood up and hiked to the summit in less than an hour, but as it was it seemed to take him all day, reaching its summit with the last of his strength, unable to stand, crawling onward. He was too tired to notice, as he attained the plateau at the top of the mountain, that he was crawling through the garden patch of a homestead. By the time the dog bounded up to him and commenced barking, it was too late to find a way around.

  “Jist hold it right thar!” a voice yelled at him, a high-pitched, trembling voice trying too hard to sound stern. He looked up into the muzzle of a shotgun held by a woman standing beside the barking dog. He raised his hands, one of them holding the bow and the arrows. “Drap thet bone air!” the woman ordered him; he complied and continued to hold his hands over his head, kneeling. She approached closer. “You kin understand English, huh?” she said. “Yo’re a smart Injun, huh?”

  “I aint no Injun,” he said.

  “Take off yore hat,” she ordered, and he removed the coonskin cap, revealing his close-cropped scalp. Enough of his hair had grown back in two weeks or so to show that he was blond. The woman moved even closer but kept the shotgun pointed at his chest. “You aint, air ye?” she declared, in wonder. She appeared to be a youngish woman, or…it was hard to tell…she had lived a hard life that made her look thirty when she was hardly into her twenties. He reflected that she looked more like an Indian than he did. “What’re ye doin creepin aroun in my guh-yarden with thet thar bone air?” she asked.

  He looked down at his knees, and, sure enough, he had been crawling among squash vines. “I’m right sorry,” he said. “I didn’t notice it was yore guh-yarden.”

  “Whar ye from?” she demanded.

  “Stay More,” he said, but her blank look told him she had never heard of it, and he added, “Up in Newton County.”

  She inclined her head over her shoulder. “That’s a fur piece up yonder,” she said.

  “How fur?” he asked.

  “You don’t know?” she challenged.

  “I aint never been in this part of the country afore,” he said.

  “Wal, it’s ever bit of seven mile to the county line,” she said.

  He laughed, partly with pleasure. “That’s all?” he said. And then he exulted, “I’m jist about home!” But by then exhaustion, from having climbed the mountain and encountered a stranger, had taken hold of him: he abruptly lost his balance on his knees and fell over and then just lay there on his side, unable to rise.

  “Air ye porely?” she asked, with some solicitation, dropping the muzzle of the shotgun. He could have reached up and yanked it out of her hand if he had wanted.

  “Jist tard,” he declared, weakly. “Jist real tard.”

  “Come sit in the shade of the porch, and I’ll fetch ye a drink,” she offered, and with surprising strength for a woman lifted him up from the ground so that he could stagger onward to her house.

  He stayed to supper. More than that: he stayed the night. The woman—her name, she said, was Mary Jane Thomas—had two children, a girl of five named Elizabeth and a boy of three, Edward Junior, who were fascinated with this strange visitor wearing coonskin, deerskin, bearskin, and carrying a bone air. Edward Thomas Senior had been killed in an accident down to the sawmill two years before, and Mary Jane had stayed on at the homeplace, making a decent enough living off the land. This place was called Raspberry; there were two other families down the trail not too far, and that was it: Raspberry, Arkansas, population eighteen.

  From Raspberry to Ben Hur, which was in northernmost Pope County, almost on the Newton County line, was indeed only seven miles, and this closeness to home (even though Ben Hur was still a good thirty or thirty-five miles from Stay More) was the reason Nail resisted Mary Jane’s suggestion to stay awhile, or even forever if he had a mind to. She served him a magnificent supper: chicken and dumplings with sweet corn on the cob, a mess of fresh greens, snap beans, sliced tomatoes, and for dessert a blackberry cobbler with real cream. After putting the children to bed, she used the rest of the cookstove’s heat to warm up some water for a good bath for Nail, with real soap, and a shave if he so desired (he did), and a change of clothes: he could help himself to what was left of her late husband’s wardrobe, such as it was; Eddie Thomas had been roughly the same size, not quite as tall, as Nail. But before Nail put on his fresh shirt and trousers, she insisted on inspecting his wounds. She wanted to know how he had got each of them, and without going into detail about his crossing of the Arkansas River he explained that this wound had come from the sharp stob on a log and this wound had come from the claws of a bear, and so had this one, and these were tick bites or chigger bites, of course, and these were just blisters from his shoes, which were too tight. She gave him a pair of her late husband’s boots, which fit too. She concocted a salve or ointment of some herbal or vegetable matter (he could only make out the smells of polecat weed and mullein leaves), which she insisted would help his cuts and bruises and scabs, and put it on the bad places for him. It was soothing. She offered him the makings of a cigarette, some leftover papers and a tobacco p
ouch of her late husband’s, but he thanked her and declined. She asked if he would mind if she read the Bible aloud, and he didn’t mind. She read some of Leviticus, and some of Job, and this of Matthew: “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.” From the way she looked at him after reading these last words, he suspected she knew, or guessed, that he had been in prison.

  It grew late. She yawned and told him, “I aint got a spare bed. You’d be welcome to mine if this weren’t jist the first night and I hardly know ye. Tomorrow night maybe we could jist sleep together.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I’m much obliged. I’d be jist fine on a pallet on the floor, and tomorrow I’ve got to be gittin me a soon start on back up home.”

  But the next morning, before breakfast, after a whole day of not bothering him at all, the chill hit him again. It shook him, and kept on shaking him violently for nearly an hour, although the woman piled up every quilt she owned on top of him, after getting him up off his pallet and into her deep, warm featherbed. At first she blamed and berated herself, thinking the chill had been caused by his sleeping on the floor, but soon she saw it was something much more severe than any lack of hospitality could have been blamed for.