The Choiring Of The Trees

by Donald Harington

  In the mouth of the cavern, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the first thing I saw was the rifle. A .22, lying on top of a big wad of black fur: the skin of a bear, I figured out. Neither the rifle nor the bearskin was among the items that Viridis and I had steadily been furnishing the cavern with. Viridis had considered leaving the Smith & Wesson revolver in the cavern but had decided to keep it with her, for her own protection. She had left no firearm here, or at least she hadn’t told me about any firearm, and she told me virtually everything.

  And then I saw him. I knew it was him, and yet I was afraid. Who else could it have been? Since that last time in court I’d nearly forgotten what he looked like, except for his body: no man of my acquaintance, then or after, ever had a body as splendidly put together and held together as Nail Chism did, all the parts of it in perfect shape and accord. The body was sprawled out face up on the bed that Viridis and I had prepared for him. His eyes were closed, and I had to study his chest for a long time to determine that it was slightly moving with his breathing. He was not dead. But he was sound asleep at full day, nine o’clock in the morning. I’d expected to see him in prison clothes, something of which I had only a vague idea, zebra stripes and such, nothing like what he was actually wearing: just a man’s light-blue chambray shirt, some gray cotton trousers, a pair of boots that didn’t look like he’d hiked all the way from Little Rock in them, and a felt fedora hat, fallen upside down behind his head as if he’d dropped to the bed without bothering to take it off.

  I resisted the impulse to shake him and see if he would awaken. I sat cross-legged on the floor of the cavern near him and studied him and felt a wild mixture of feelings: exultation that he was home, pride in my mullein stalk for being accurate and straight-up-and-down, admiration for his rugged and battered but beautiful features (the blond hair was growing back rapidly), befuddlement at his deep slumber in broad daylight, and, most of all, growing certainty that he was the one who had killed Sull Jerram. I didn’t understand why my mullein stalk had not announced his return on the same day that Sull Jerram was killed, but the ways of mullein are as mysterious as they are magic and infallible, when they’re not just being ornery.

  I had to get Viridis, and yet I could not. First I had to see if he would wake, and let him know that everything was all right and that I would fetch Viridis right away. I wanted to somehow thank him for accepting my suggestion that the glen of the waterfall would make a good hiding-place. I wanted him to know that I’d helped put all of these things in the cavern for him, which, I saw by looking around me, he hadn’t yet used: the cans of corned beef and beans and such were unopened, the pocketknife with can opener attachment untouched, the bar of soap still wrapped, the yards of mosquito netting neatly folded up, the hunting-knife still sheathed. He had not disturbed any of these things…except, I noticed, the harmonica, which now lay on top of the pile of bedclothes, near his open hand, as if he had held it and maybe even played on it but let it drop.

  For the rest of the morning I stayed with him, waiting for him to wake. It must have been getting on toward noon. Rouser had wandered off after giving a good long sniff to the bearskin and to Nail’s body. Maybe Rouser had gone back home; he wasn’t all that faithful. I was getting hungry, and thought of opening a can of something to eat, but the sound of the can opener might wake him, so I waited. I felt like an intruder, in a way. I was invading Nail’s privacy, or the privacy of his sleep: in sleep the body does things to us that we don’t know about but wouldn’t want to share with anyone else: in sleep Nail’s most private part distended and bulged mightily within his trousers, and fascinated me but reddened me all over with embarrassment or guilt at watching or…yes, reddened me with a kind of lust. I was not, for going on three years now, a virgin, and I knew the meaning of that thickening and extension inside his pants, but I had never actually observed it, even if my observation now was impeded by the covering of his trousers. I knew it could happen in dreams: sometimes I’d seen Rouser asleep, when he wasn’t chasing rabbits in his dreams, chasing some imaginary bitch and letting his pink thing swell and pop out of its furry sheath and drool. I wondered if Nail was dreaming about Viridis, even dreaming about something he’d never done, because, to the best of my knowledge at that time, in twenty-seven years he had never succeeded in doing what I had done nearly three years before, when I was only eleven. While studying him, I amused myself by imagining that I was reaching out and unbuttoning the fly of his trousers and liberating from the prison of its clothes that big convict.

  This daydream was so real and diverting that I was shocked to realize his eyes were open and looking at me as if I had actually done it. Or maybe in my lust I really had done it while thinking it was only a daydream. One of his big hands abruptly covered his groin. He stared at me and began to tremble. Was he afraid of me?

  I was smiling as big as I could, but also frowning, at his trembling. “Howdy, Nail,” I said. “It’s just me, Latha.”

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  “You made it!” I 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.”

  I reached out and put my hand on his forehead. At the real touch of his skin I knew that I had only imagined touching him down below. Reality is always more touchable than imagination. “You’re real cold,” I said. “Cold as death.”

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

  I drew a blanket up over him. And then another one. And yet another one. And then a quilt. I draped and tucked more covers over him than I’d ever had myself the coldest winter night of my life, and still he shook so mightily that I thought he’d pop right out of the bed. I couldn’t understand how anybody could be so cold on such a hot morning. Well, it was cooler in the cavern than out in the sunshine, but not all that cool. I touched my own brow, and I felt normal; no, I felt a good bit hotter than normal. I considered that his conscience might be giving him a nervous chill: that he had killed a man and now feared the consequences. But nobody ever shook like that simply from guilt or fear. He was, I understood, sick. I wanted to run and fetch not Viridis but Doc Swain, but I was afraid that Nail would shake himself to death and freeze while I was gone.

  So, almost without thinking, I did what I did: I climbed beneath the covers with him and held him tight, trying to warm him with the heat, the plenty of it, from my own body. The thick quilts and blankets piled atop us imprisoned my body heat and divided it with him, but that was not enough for both of us: I became cold myself. Together we trembled for a long time. We didn’t have our arms around each other, not all four arms anyhow, but we had our bodies pressed as hard together as they could get, and that big bulge down there in his pants had never gone away, and my mind was filled with wild thoughts and fear and chill and lust and everything.

  Then we were not side by side, exactly. In an effort to still his shaking, I had pressed down on him, mashed him to his back, and I lay hard atop him, the whole length of him, mashing down, and then he did have both arms around me, around my back and my waist both, holding me tight to him. We squirmed and shook and squeezed in that position for so long that somehow the bulge in his britches worked itself directly beneath the juncture of my thighs so that our most private places were not just touching but mashing very hard and rubbing harder, and before I knew it I had begun a different kind of shaking, not of nervousness or chill but of fulfillment of the exertion and labor of love. I cried out. Maybe, even, I passed out, because the next thing I was aware of, and it seemed time had gone by, he was no longer trembling at all. He was perfectly still, except for his breathing, and he had thrown the covers off us, and I wondered if the weight of all of me on top of him was mashing him uncomfortably, but he didn’t seem to mind, and I didn’t want to move from that position just yet,
because I knew that once I did, I would never find myself like that with him, ever again.

  At last I rolled off and lay there beside him, not touching him anymore, giving him up to whoever would claim him that he belonged to. I just looked at him, with love but also with a little wondering: had he maybe just faked his shaking in order to get me to do what I’d done? Because he wasn’t shaking the least bit anymore. He was smiling, and I know it was just a smile of being friendly and maybe a little embarrassed, but it also seemed like a smile of having tricked me into that enjoyment.

  Then he said, “You went over the mountain.”

  “Yeah,” I said, as if to let him know that I knew what he meant saying that. “I got over the mountain.”

  “You’re not Viridis,” he said, as if he’d just noticed.

  I had to laugh. “I wish I was,” I said. “I sure truly wish I really was. But don’t you even know me?”

  He smiled again. “Some ways, you’re better than Viridis,” he said.

  “What ways?” I wanted to know.

  “You’re home folks,” he said. “You wrote and told me about this hideaway. And I do honestly misdoubt that she’d have warmed me up the way you jist now did. Or gone over the mountain.”

  “Aw, I had to climb that mountain,” I said.

  “I know you did,” he said. “I shore appreciate it, what-all you’ve done.”

  “You’re not shakin no more,” I observed.

  “No, you see, Latha, I’ve got the two-day ague, and the way it works is, I shake like crazy for an hour, and then I’m burnin up, like I am right now, for another little spell, and then I commence to sweat like a stud horse—’scuse me, Latha—I get soppin wet for a time, and then I’m okay for another twenty-four hours, and it hits me again the next day.”

  “I’ve never had that,” I declared, “but I’ve heard of it. You’ve done been skeeterbit.”

  “Yeah, that’s what causes it,” he said. “Skeeters.”

  “You’d best let me run and fetch Doc Swain,” I told him. “And of course Viridis too. She’d be real mad at me if she knew I’d come up here by myself.”

  “You don’t have to tell her nothin,” he told me.

  “I’ll make up a story,” I said. “I’m pretty good at that, don’t you know?”

  “I reckon,” he said.

  I stood up and straightened my dress and patted my hair into place. “Can I get you anything ’fore I go? A drink of water? Anything to eat?”

  “Just maybe a sip of water is all, right now,” he said, lying there in the pain of his high fever.

  “And we’d better hide that .22 before Doc Swain sees it,” I announced, and tried to think of a safe place to hide it.

  “How come?” Nail wanted to know.

  “How come? Well, his dad is still justice of the peace, don’t you know, and they’ve already been up here checkin when they came to get Sull’s body, so naturally Doc would put two and two together and know it was you.” Nail just stared at me as if he hadn’t the faintest idea what I was talking about, and I began to wonder if maybe he really didn’t. “That is your rifle yonder, aint it?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “How long have you been here? What day did you get here?”

  He shook his head. “I honestly aint got the foggiest notion.” Then he asked, “What did you say about Sull’s body?”

  Somehow, the way he asked that, I knew he really didn’t know anything about it. Maybe he had done it in his delirium, but maybe he hadn’t done it at all. “Nail,” I said, “day before yesterday morning, right down the trail yonder, Sull Jerram was shot off his horse with a .22 bullet.”

  The way Nail looked, I knew he was, if not innocent, ignorant of the act. “What was he doin up here?” he asked.

  “Followin Viridis to find your hidin-place, I reckon,” I said.

  “Who shot him? Did she do it?”

  “No, I thought it was you, but maybe it wasn’t, if you weren’t even here day before yesterday.”

  “Where was he hit?”

  “Right yonder, jist beyond that big white ash tree.”

  “No, I mean where in his body did the bullet hit him?”

  I touched a spot behind my ear. “Right here,” I said.

  Nail shook his head. “Was he hurt bad?”

  “He’s dead, Nail.”

  “No.”

  It got awfully quiet up there in that cavern; all you could hear was the sound of the waterfall. Finally I made some conversation: “They buried him this mornin up at the Jasper cemetery, but your sister wasn’t even plannin to go to the funeral, and I don’t reckon nobody else went neither, ’cept the preacher and maybe the sherf.” Nail didn’t comment on that, so I went on: “You never saw such a happy bunch of folks as everbody in Stay More. We threw a big squar dance up to the schoolhouse to celebrate.” Nail managed a smile but didn’t say anything about that either. “The sherf locked up your brother Waymon at the Jasper jail, but Waymon has got a good alibi because he was gone plumb to Harrison at the time it happened, to get some medicine for your dad.”

  “How’s my dad?” Nail asked.

  “I reckon Doc Swain can tell ye all about that,” I said. “I better go git him right now.” Then I suggested, “Why don’t I jist take that .22 with me and hide it somewheres off from here?”

  “No,” Nail said. “Leave it where it is. I want Doc Swain to see it.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said.

  He smiled. “So are you, Latha. Comin up here like ye done. Takin keer of me. Warmin me up like ye done. Weren’t ye scared there was a danger I could’ve raped ye like they thought I done to Rindy?”

  I smiled. “I wush ye had done somethin to me. And now I won’t never git me another chance. Good-bye, Nail.” I turned and fled.

  I wondered who to tell first: Viridis or Doc Swain. As it turned out, I didn’t have to decide, because when I went into the village looking for one or the other, I found them sitting together out on the porch of Doc Swain’s clinic, enjoying the shade and the afternoon breeze. I don’t know what they’d been talking about as I strolled up, but they’d become pretty good friends and could have been talking about anything under the sun.

  “Howdy, Latha,” Doc Swain said.

  “Howdy, Doc,” I said.

  “Hi, Latha. How are you today?” Viridis said.

  “Hi, Viridis. I’m pretty good. How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “I wish it would come a rain,” Doc Swain said.

  “We could use one,” I allowed.

  “I wish it would come a man named Nail,” Viridis said.

  “We could use one of them too,” I said. I timed a few beats before adding, “And it looks like we’ve done finally got one, sure enough.”

  Doc and Viridis both raised their eyebrows at me. “How’s thet?” Doc asked.

  “He’s back,” I said.

  Doc looked up and down the main road of Stay More. “Shore,” he said. “On a big fine white horse, in a full suit of steel armor and chain mail.”

  “No, he’s flat on his back, with alternate-day malaria,” I said.

  Doc said, “Huh?” and Viridis said, “Where?”

  “At the waterfall,” I said to her. And then I had my story ready for her: “I thought I’d seen you on Rosabone riding by, heading that way, and I figured you’d looked for me and not found me, so I ran off after you, but I couldn’t catch up, and so I went on to the waterfall by myself, and there he was, in the cavern.”

  Viridis jumped up. “Really?” she said.

  “Yes, and he’s got a bad case of alternate-day malaria, and this is the alternate day, with chills and fevers and sweats.”

  Doc Swain jumped up. “Really?” he said. “That’s shore enough the symptoms. Where is this cavern?”

  “Just beyond where you went day before yesterday morning.”

  Doc and Viridis exchanged looks, and I knew they were thinking what I had thought, and I said, “But I d
on’t think it could’ve been him who done it. I don’t think he even got here until sometime last night.”

  Viridis was leaving the porch. “I’ll saddle Rosabone,” she said.

  Doc was leaving the porch. “Let me get my bag, and then I’ll get my horse too.”

  I was not leaving the porch. They hadn’t invited me. I waited to see if either of them would think to invite me. I didn’t have a horse, and I’d slow them down if I rode behind Viridis on Rosabone, and I was prepared to refuse the offer if she made it. But she didn’t. She reappeared very shortly, astride the mare. She hadn’t bothered to stop to change into her jodhpurs but was still wearing her dress and had hiked it up immodestly to get her legs over the mare’s back. Doc Swain appeared on his horse, with his gladstone bag strapped behind the saddle. His dog tried to go with them, but Doc said, “Sit, Galen. Stay,” and the dog obeyed.

  At least, both Doc and Viridis thought to wave good-bye to me.

  I was hungry, I hadn’t had any dinner, but I just sat there on Doc’s porch. The least I could do, I thought, was act as his receptionist; in case any patients came, I could tell them the doctor was out on a call and would be back shortly. How shortly I didn’t know, but I sat there for a long time on Doc’s porch. Galen slept. No patients came. Some of the men who gathered every afternoon over on the porch of Ingledew’s store drifted into the village and took their places, sitting on crates, nail kegs, and odd chairs, whittling with their pocketknives and spitting, and scarcely throwing me a glance. Doc Plowright, who had his clinic practically right across the road from Doc Swain’s, stepped out on his porch and stared at me for a bit, wondering what a patient of his was doing sitting on the porch of his competitor. Then he went back inside. He didn’t have any patients today either.