So she gets up, and from one of the sacks in the cavern she fills her straw hat with oats, and takes it out to Rosabone, and sets it down where the mare can eat the oats. “Don’t eat my hat,” she says. Then she gets the bundle of letters out of the saddlebag. She pats the mare’s neck and speaks some last words to her: “You’ll hear me talking, Rosabone. All night long you’ll hear me talking, but I won’t be talking to you. You get some sleep, and we’ll go back to the village in the morning.”
All night long the mare hears her mistress talking. But surely, sometime in the night, the mare dozes off.
Viridis Monday holds nothing back. She reads it all. Once, after lighting the lantern and resuming, she asks him, “Is this boring you?”
“I thought you’d know me better than to ask a question like that,” he says. “Don’t stop.”
But once again, much later, she interrupts herself to ask, “Does that shock you?”
He is smiling, not with mirth but with pleasure. “I reckon I can stand it,” he allows, offhand.
And again, when she comes, in time, to the story of the night she thought she was going to be allowed to spend in his cell, and is describing in detail what she anticipated, she hears his breathing quicken and what might be a gasp, and she stops to say, “Of course I’m just making up this whole part. It’s just what I had imagined might happen.”
“It happened,” he says. “If you wrote it, it happened.”
His saying that, his way of putting it, eases her, makes her more comfortable and confident with her own telling and her own invention. But it also perhaps leads to, or at least explains, what eventually happens this night, which is of course only written but also happening.
A strange thing: at some point she ceases to distinguish between what has been written and what is happening.
She has reached the present in her narrative: she has discovered that her narrative itself has switched from the past tense to the present tense and she is describing time as it occurs. She is surprised to discover herself reading a letter in which she describes what she is doing right now: sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cavern beside Nail’s bed, reading him a letter in which she describes herself sitting cross-legged…
Tiredness might be a contributing factor; for Nail, it could be the effects of the quinine: a strange tinnitus that makes him hear not what she is saying but what he wants her to be saying. Is that it? Is she actually continuing to read from her actually written letter or simply describing aloud what happens as it happens? This is very strange, and no sound comes from Nail, except once when she stops and asks, “What am I saying? What am I doing?” and he observes, “You’re asking yourself, What am I saying? What am I doing?”
All this night she has held nothing back from him. Her whole life, and every thought she’s considered of any importance, has been laid bare to him. Her most secret and private imaginings have been put so clearly to him that they have become his own. Not just with candor, because candor implies a conscious opening up, and she has not been closed to begin with, but with total truth, she has turned herself inside out to him, and as the night wears on she discovers that she is naked and unashamed.
Never before, since her mother first clothed her, has she been naked to anyone except herself. But the nakedness of her body is as nothing; it is almost anticlimax, almost redundant. Especially because she has already written this in the letter too: I have on no clothes now. Now in the glare of coal oil light I am without a stitch. It does not bother me that he is not following suit, because I have already seen him without a stitch, in the death chamber, and because his time to be as bare as me will come later. Now is mine. His turn is later, after I have nothing left to reveal to him.
His turn comes at dawn. On this morning, the beginning of the alternate day of his two-day ague, the day he will not shake from cold or burn from fever or drip with sweat, he realizes that it is his turn, because she has told him everything she has to tell, given him everything she has to give, done for him everything that can be done.
Far off
Well, I’ll be!” I’ll say, seeing Every Dill come walking up to my front porch, carrying a big earthenware bowl with a lid on it. It will be the first time I’ll have had a good look at him since that night when I was eleven and I had to stay at his folks’ house while everybody but me and him went to a funeral, and we wound up in the same bed.
“Good mornin, Latha,” he’ll say, and hold the big bowl out to me. “Maw said fer me to give ye this.”
“Jist set it down there with them others,” I’ll tell him, and gesture toward the porch floor, where there will already be twenty-three assorted bowls, pots, tureens, casseroles, and other containers, each of them steaming with what I know is the same thing that’s in his: chicken and dumplings.
“Yore dog will git it,” he will object, nodding his head toward Rouser and continuing to hold the bowl out to me.
“Rouser’s done et one of them, and licked the bowl clean,” I will point out. “Caint you see how his belly’s all pooched out? He won’t eat another’n before suppertime leastways, and maybe by then we’ll figure out what to do with that many bowls of chicken’n dumplins.”
“Huh?” Every will say. “You mean everlast one o’ them bowls has got chicken dumplims in ’um?” When I nod, he will say, “Wal, heck, Nail and that lady could never eat all of them in a month of Sundays, could they?” When I will shake my head, he will say, “Wal, heck, mize well take this’un on back home.”
“Suit yourself,” I will tell him.
“But Maw tole me to leave it, I’d better leave it, don’t ye reckon?”
“Whatever ye think.”
He will set the bowl down on the porch, but in front of the others so that it might get taken first when the time will come. He will study it. “Wal, heck,” he will say, “it aint even dinnertime yet, but I wouldn’t mind havin a bite or two of that myself, if ye’d lend me the borry of a fork.”
“I’ll git ye a plate,” I will tell him and go into the house for a clean plate and a fork and a big spoon for him to serve up a pile with.
“Who’s that out there?” my mother will ask.
“Every,” I’ll tell her. “Now we’ve got twenty-four bowls of chicken’n dumplins. But I think he’s fixin to help eat part of one.”
“Law sakes,” my mother will say. “I never thought them Dills had a chicken around the place. Must’ve been a ole rooster.”
I will take the eating equipment to Every, and I will watch him eat. He will eat as if it has indeed been a long time since he’s had anything as good as chicken and dumplings, and I will reflect that given a chance he might even grow up to look and sound a little bit like Nail Chism. But right now he’ll be just a fourteen-year-old towhead who’s pretty well earned his nickname Pickle. I will scarcely be able to convince myself that I, who came awfully close to making love to Nail himself just yesterday morning, already lost my virginity to this boy a couple of years before.
This boy will pause in his chewing and ask, “What’re ye thinkin about, Latha?”
I will manage a smile. “Us,” I will say, “I aint hardly seen you since.”
He will blush furiously. But he will pretend not to know what I’m talking about. “Since when?” he will ask.
“Since that night you crope into my bed.”
“I never!” he will protest. “It was more lak you crope inter mine.”
“The bed was in your house, and your folks owned it, but it was my bed at the time.”
“But it was the bed I slept in every night of my life,” he will point out.
“But you were sposed to sleep on a pallet in th’other room,” I will remind him. “Don’t you remember?”
“Yeah, but I reckon I was kind of groggy and conflummoxed,” he will observe. “Heck, maybe I was even sleepwalkin.”
“Every Dill,” I will accuse him, “don’t you even remember what you and me did?”
“Was you awake?” he will ask
.
“Silly! We talked for an hour before we did it. Don’t you remember?”
“Yeah, it kinder comes back to me,” he will admit.
“I’m sorry to hear it ever left you in the first place.”
A silence will ensue. He will be just standing there in the dirt yard beside my front porch, shuffling his bare feet in the dirt, hanging his head bashfully, poking his hands into the pockets of his overalls, and taking them out again. At length he will ask, without looking at me, “Did you not mind what we done?”
“It hurt some at first,” I will admit. “And you were awful impatient. But it was a heap of fun.”
“It was?” He will lift his eyes and search mine.
“Sure was.”
“You got all limp and still, like I’d kilt ye.”
“I reckon I must’ve just swooned for a bit.”
“Because I was hurtin ye?”
“No, because I’d done went and gone over the mountain.”
His look will tell me that he does not understand and that it would be no use, yet, for me to try to explain it. He will give me that look for a while before changing it to another look with narrowed eyes and a question: “Would ye lak to do it again?”
I will look around me as if we are being observed, and of course we are, because you, dear reader, will be observing us. In a hushed voice I will say, “Not right here. Not right now.”
He will laugh. “I never meant that. I jist meant sometime.”
“Okay,” I will grant. “Some time. But you ought to know, when we did it before, I was still a little too young to get…to have…to make a baby. I aint, anymore. I could make one now. You ought to know that.”
“We’d have to be real keerful, wouldn’t we?” he will allow. I will observe that just the talking about it, just the implication that we might do it again sometime, has given him a noticeable bulging in the fork of his overalls, which I will recognize from having seen on another male just the day before. For a moment I will be possessed of a wild urge to grab his hand and lead him off to the barn, until I recall that I am custodian of twenty-four pots of chicken and dumplings and have not yet decided how I am going to transport even one of them up to the glen of the waterfall. And I will realize that, possessed as I am by this urge, I have not been listening carefully, and that Every has asked me a question.
“What did ye say?” I will ask.
“I ast ye, when?” he will say. “When can we?”
I am about to reply, when we are interrupted by the arrival of the twenty-fifth bowl of chicken and dumplings. It will come by automobile, the first one to enter our yard in quite a spell. The driver of the car will be a man I haven’t seen in quite a longer spell, but I will remember him from his trip to Stay More with the sheriff and Judge Jerram, and I will certainly remember him from his courtroom, where I had to testify. It will be Judge Lincoln Villines, alone again like the time he came to pay a call on Viridis and the old woman.
He will stand in the yard, holding the fancy china serving-dish and looking at me and then at Every. “Howdy,” he will say, and then squint his eyes at me again. “You shore are Latha Bourne, aint ye? I seem to recall you from once I seen you afore.” When I nod my head in acknowledgment, he will say, “I was tole that you was the one could take this yere bowl of victuals up to Nail Chism and his ladyfriend.” When I nod again, taking the bowl from him and setting it among the others, he will glance at Every and say, “But I don’t believe I know you.”
“I was just leavin anyhow,” Every will say, and start shuffling off. “See you later, Latha,” he will say.
I will be a little put out with Every, that he has taken off like that and left me alone to deal with the judge, who will now watch as Every disappears and turn back to me to ask, “Your brother?”
“My beau,” I will say.
The judge will snort a laugh but then cover his mouth with his hand. “Aint you kind of young to carry that bowl way off through the woods to where they’re hidin?”
I will point at the hodgepodge of bowls filling the porch. “No, but I reckon I’m too young to figger out some way to get all them other bowls up to ’em.”
The judge will finally notice the great assortment of other bowls and look at them like a suitor appraising the crowd of fellow suitors for a lady’s hand. “What’s in them?” he will ask.
“Same as what’s in yourn,” I will say.
“Chicken’n dumplins?” he will ask.
“Yep,” I will say.
“My, my,” he will say, and will meditate upon the fact, like a suitor discovering that his competition is just as strong and handsome and rich as he is. “News shore travels fast, don’t it?” Then he will ask, “Wal, how air ye figgerin on gittin even one of them bowls up the mountain to ’em?”
“I got two hands, aint I?”
“Yeah, but it’s a fur ways off,” he will say. “Real fur off.”
I will begin wondering how he happens to know just how far off it is. His reference to “the woods where they are hidin” and “up the mountain” will indicate to me that he has a pretty good idea of where they are. I will wonder if the news traveling fast has told the whole world not only that Nail Chism has a hankering for some chicken and dumplings but also just where he’s hiding. But nobody else will know, except me and Doc Swain, who surely will not have told anybody.
It will suddenly dawn on me why, or rather how, Judge Lincoln Villines knows where Nail and Viridis are. But I will pretend ignorance and innocence and will tell him, “The reason I aint taken any of these bowls up there yet is that I’m not too sure just where it is they’re hiding.”
“You’re not?” he will say. “I was tole that you was the only one that knows.”
I will gesture vaguely northward. “I jist think it’s somewheres up yonder.”
He will correct my gesture, pointing properly eastward. “Naw, it’s over yonderways, up that mountain.”
“Could you show me?” I will ask.
“Well, I don’t want to go right up to the cave with ye, but I could lead ye part of the ways.”
“As far as where Sull Jerram was shot?” I will ask.
“Shore, I could take ye that—” Abruptly he will stop and change what he’s saying to: “Everbody knows whar that is, don’t they?”
“Nossir,” I will tell him. “Jist me and whoever it was kilt him.”
Will it matter, in the end, who killed Sewell Jerram? I think that what will matter, what will be of any interest to anybody, will be not so much the identity of the culprit as, rather, the motive. The reason that Sull Jerram was shot and killed was not because he was about to molest Viridis, not because he had raped and abused Dorinda Whitter, not because he had sent an innocent man to prison, but because he alone knew how much Lincoln Villines had to do with the bootlegging operation that had started the whole thing.
Arkansas has had a number of governors who were less than brilliant, less than capable, less than gubernatorial. George Washington Hays himself, despite his corruption, was not without intelligence, was a man who made many mistakes but was at least smart enough to realize when he had made a mistake. In this story Governor Hays will not last much longer, not as governor. In November he will announce that he will not seek reelection. He is intelligent enough to know that he would probably be defeated if he did seek it. Lincoln Villines was not intelligent enough to realize that he could never have been elected to the office even if he had not been stupid enough to get involved in a bootlegging operation.
A professor of political economy at the University of Arkansas, Charles Hillman Brough (the name rhymes with “tough”), will decide to campaign for the 1916 Democratic nomination for governor, opposing not just Hays, if he chooses to run again, but Hays’s entire machine, especially the Jeff Davis faction of the machine, which will appear so eager to hand the nomination to hillbilly Lincoln Villines…until suddenly Villines will not only be revealed to have a shady past but also be suspected of, and then ind
icted for, murdering a fellow judge, Sewell Jerram, who had threatened to expose that shady past.
The scandal will shake the Democratic Party but not to the extent of preventing its nominee, Brough, from swamping the Republican and Socialist nominees in the general election, by almost a hundred thousand votes.
As one of his last acts in office, as the very last of a long string of sometimes questionable pardons, Governor Hays will grant a pardon to Lincoln Villines, then under a relatively light sentence of ten years, a Newton County jury having convicted him not of murder, reasoning that it isn’t murder to do away with a bad man, but of “voluntary manslaughter,” as the foreman attempted to classify it.
Governor Hays in retirement will keep a law office in Little Rock and will publish a number of articles in national publications, arguing his continued advocacy of capital punishment as the only alternative to mob violence. During Prohibition and the Jazz Age he will remain a staunch supporter of Alfred Smith as the Democrats’ candidate for president, because, he will point out, “It was the Republican Party that tried to force the social equality of the Negro upon the Aryan people of the South.” But Hays will not live to see Smith win Arkansas while losing most of the South and the election. Hays will die as another advocate of Aryan supremacy, an Austrian named Schicklgruber, is rising to power in Germany.
Governor Brough, an erudite and persuasive man bent upon prison reform and better roads and education, will as one of his first acts of office consider extending a pardon to Nail Chism, unconditional except for one little condition: that Nail Chism come to Little Rock, give himself up directly to the governor, and receive his pardon. That offer will be something for Nail to think about.
But there will be many other things for Nail to think about before then. At one point he will have to decide whether or not he and his lady should relinquish their sylvan sanctuary and move back to society. It will become clear, after a while, that nobody is really trying to find them. Nearly everybody will know that they are up there, somewhere, high on Ledbetter Mountain in a cave or cavern near a spectacular waterfall. They will know that I have made countless trips up there myself, each time carrying a bowl of chicken and dumplings, and I myself will have heard of the men on Ingledew’s storeporch making bets on which will happen first: the remaining chicken and dumplings will spoil, or Nail will grow tired of them. And sure enough, those wagering on the former contingency will be victorious.
The Choiring Of The Trees Page 48
