I guess I blushed furiously. “You have better’uns,” I declared.
Again that smile, and I must have tried to ape it without letting her see my bad teeth again. She reached out and put her hand lightly on my arm. “You know I’m here to save him,” she said.
“Here?” was all I could think to say, as if it were here in this house that he was facing that electric chair.
“Here on earth,” she said.
I was brave, and I said, “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“Would you show me the playhouse?” she asked.
I had to think about that, I’m sorry to say. Looking back, I should have just nodded my head eagerly and said, “Come on!” But I couldn’t quite yet bring myself to violate so easily a solemn oath, even if I didn’t care a fig for the person I’d made the oath to. So I had to think about it, for a long moment, with the clock a-ticking away on the fireboard. Finally I said, “We swore we’d never tell anybody where it is.”
“I understand,” she said. And another long minute went by before she said, “Well, maybe you could just describe it to me.”
I stood up. “No, I’ll take ye. What I swore don’t matter anymore. Not to me, it don’t.” I fetched my wrap and told Momma we’d be back in time for supper.
We weren’t. It’s a good brisk hike any time of year up the mountainside to the place where that old playhouse leans up against that old basso profundo oak tree. On that late-winter afternoon we had to walk around the snowy places, and she was being extra careful not to get the hem of her fancy dress in the mud. She talked a lot, telling me every little detail of how she’d come to stay with the old woman at Jacob Ingledew’s and how the old woman had let her dress in Sarah’s costume from twenty years before.
She seemed more impressed with that oak tree than with the playhouse, which was just a pile of lumber anyhow. She stood there looking up at the tree for the longest time. I told her it was a white oak tree. It was over a hundred feet high (I’d climbed it once as far as I could go and measured it with a ball of twine), and it must have been overlooked when they cut nearly every white oak in the county to make staves for whiskey barrels…not for Chism’s Dew but shipped off to the big government distillers in far places like Kentucky. I’m not even sure that tree was on land that belonged to my father, but I knew I owned that tree as much as anybody did.
“Did you know,” she said quietly, looking up at the great tree, “that Nail thinks trees can sing?”
I was surprised that she would say it like that, almost as if she didn’t quite believe it herself. It wasn’t till later that I learned she believed it just as fiercely as he did. I was also surprised at what I said myself then: “That makes two of us.”
“Oh, do you believe it too?” she said, looking at me with delight, as if somehow all this business about singing trees were more important than the question of Nail’s innocence. And then she asked, “Is this tree singing right now?”
I honestly couldn’t have said that it was, at least I wasn’t hearing anything, but I looked at her as if she were deaf, and said, “Don’t you hear it?” I was just being playful, sort of teasing, but she looked startled and then began listening. When she perked up her ears like that, I did too.
We heard it.
Yes, the tree was intoning some sorrowful, deep spiritual, and there is no mistake that what we heard was the tree, but there was another sound in there besides. We listened, and even if the tree’s keening had been our imaginations, because we wanted the tree to sing, that was not the main sound we heard. Because the tree was, I keep saying, a basso profundo, and this sound was more a mezzo-soprano, and it was coming not from the tree but from inside the playhouse.
I pushed aside the old discarded quilt that served as a doorflap for the playhouse, and I looked inside. There was Rindy, kneeling, head bowed, clutching against her bosom one of our oldest discarded dolls. She was swaying slowly to and fro, rocking the headless and mouldering dollbaby and crooning a sort of lullaby to it. She was wearing an old rag of a coat, a threadbare thing that couldn’t be keeping her warm. Viridis followed me into the playhouse.
“Miss Monday,” I said, making the introductions, “this here is Dorinda June Whitter.”
Viridis Monday stayed a whole week in Stay More. Every night, sometimes before dark if she could manage it, she would return the team and buggy to Ingledew’s Livery and then cross the road to Jacob Ingledew’s house and sit up until bedtime talking to the old woman. That ancient dowager would serve a fortified wine from a Spanish town called Jerez. Usually Viridis reported in detail to the woman on what she had achieved during the day, and sometimes the woman would give her advice or at least make commentary on that day’s events and accomplishments. It was the old woman who (out of her experience as social secretary to the state’s first lady) drafted the wording of the petition to the governor, for Viridis to take with her on her rounds of interviewing the citizens of Stay More and some other places in Newton County, for their signatures or their X’s. Surely, I thought, the woman herself would have been the first to sign the petition, but she was not, because, you have to remember, that was still four years before suffrage, four years before that June day when Congress would give women the right to vote or even to sign effective petitions. Except for Dorinda’s, all of the signatures and X’s on Viridis’ petition were men’s…including nine of the original twelve jurymen who had convicted Nail. If she could have found them, she would have had all twelve.
Viridis invited Dorinda and me to ride with her in the phaeton when she set off for Jasper to hunt up some of the jurymen. It was a Sunday, and sunny, the first really warm day we’d had that year, with the last of the patches of snow melting into the earth; a good day for a drive, without the road too muddy yet. Rindy and I both wore our best; hers was that same white Sears lawn dress she’d worn for the trial, which was out of season for February but all she had that would look good for going into the county seat on a Sunday. She was cheerful. I hadn’t seen her so happy since this whole business had started back in June of the year before. Whatever burden of guilt had been mashing down on her was lifted by the confession she readily gave to Viridis, making a clean breast of it, exonerating poor Nail completely. She wouldn’t yet give Viridis the details of just how Sull Jerram had put her up to it, but she was ready to swear that Nail had never even touched her. She was awfully sorry. She’d had no idea at all that they would take him off and put him in that electric chair and try to kill him. Why, she’d been led to believe the most they’d ever do to him was make him say he was sorry he threatened to sic the federal law on Sull and his courthouse pals.
The first to put his big John Hancock on Viridis’ petition was Jim Tom Duckworth, who had been Nail’s lawyer before they got rid of him in favor of that Farrell Cobb, and he didn’t have any bitterness for having been dismissed and was a real gentleman about it: he not only signed the petition but wrote out an exact copy of it and put on his hat and coat and went off to get a whole bunch of signatures or X’s himself. He was the one who gave Viridis the names and general addresses of the twelve jurymen. On her own it would have taken the whole week to find just those twelve, scattered as they were, but most of them lived in or near Jasper, and we spent that Sunday tracking them down. By the time Viridis had finished talking with two or three of them, the word had quickly spread and got ahead of us, and some of the jurymen we visited seemed to be expecting us. Some of them claimed they had been mistaken in the first place and had already done changed their minds long ago, and the few who hadn’t, said that all they needed was to hear Rindy say that it weren’t so, and here she was, to say it, if need be.
We got lost trying to find the jury’s foreman, who lived on the Little Buffalo River up on the north edge of Jasper, and while we were driving around looking for his house we came across an Oldsmobile parked broadside blocking the road. Sitting behind the steering-wheel was Sheriff Duster Snow with three of his deputies there in the vehicle wi
th him, all four men wearing their silver stars pinned to the outside of their overcoats. The sheriff asked Viridis who she was looking for, and she told him, and he said that that individual was not available. Those were his words. Then he asked did she mind if he had a look at that piece of paper she was carrying around. She showed the petition to him, and he studied it and looked as if he’d like to chew it up and swallow it. He kept throwing fierce looks at Rindy and me. Rindy watched me to see what sort of fierce look I was throwing back at him, and she did a fair job of imitating mine. Finally he passed the petition back to Viridis and bobbed his Adam’s apple a few times and said, “Now lookee yere, ma’am, we caint allow no furriners a-comin in yere and a-stirrin up trouble.” Viridis said she wasn’t a foreigner but an American citizen, a native Arkansawyer. “You aint from Newton County,” Sheriff Snow said, “and this yere aint none of yore business and hit’s again the law to go stirrin up the jurymen such-a-way as this-all, and I don’t aim to stand fer it. Now you better jist git yoreself on back to wharever ye came from, and stay out of this country, if ye know what’s good fer ye.”
Viridis simply took out her Eagle fountain pen and unscrewed the cap and held the pen out toward the automobile and said, “Would any of you gentlemen like to sign this petition?” and one of the deputies reached out to do it before Sheriff Snow slapped his hand away.
Later, when we found that lost jury foreman on the Little Buffalo, we got an idea of why the sheriff hadn’t wanted us to find him: not only was he ready to sign the petition, but he wanted to make a confession of his own, that he had never been convinced of Nail’s guilt, that he had tried to hang the jury but had voted with them only after the sheriff had threatened to run him out of the country if he didn’t. Now, if Viridis would let him make a copy of that petition, he knew a good many fellows whose signatures he could obtain. He was still afraid of the sheriff, but he’d just as soon be run out of the country as have to go on the rest of his life feeling bad about sending an innocent man to that electric chair.
By the time we’d given up trying to locate one more of the jurymen, who’d gone off visiting relatives in Western Grove, it was getting so late in the afternoon that we knew we wouldn’t make it back to Stay More before dark. And we’d be sure to freeze if we tried. So Viridis decided to spend the night at the Buckhorn Hotel, an old landmark in Jasper. Rindy and I would have to miss school Monday, but we didn’t care; we’d never even dreamt of staying at the Buckhorn before, and we were so excited we couldn’t sleep. Viridis had to entertain us past bedtime. She drew our pictures (I’ve still got mine, framed, one of my prized possessions), and she told us stories and descriptions of Paris and her trip around the world.
It was way past bedtime when a knock came at the door, and Viridis opened it, and there stood Judge Sull Jerram. He didn’t have any of his henchmen or cronies with him. He just pointed past Viridis…at Rindy, who was sitting on the bed, and said, “I want to talk to her.” Viridis said she was sorry but he hadn’t even had the courtesy to introduce himself and she wasn’t in the mood to entertain strangers at this late hour. Sull looked like she had spit in his face, and he said, “Lady, they tell me yo’re from Little Rock. Okay, that’s where that nuthouse is, aint it? That’s whar she belongs. Rindy is rampin tetched in her haid, and ary fool thing she says to ye won’t be but some lie-tale she jist imagined. Now send her out here before I come in thar and git her.” But Viridis stood in the doorway and told him that if Dorinda was mentally unsound it would not be wise for her to talk with a man who was both mentally deficient and irascible. From where I sat I could tell that it took Sull a while to figure out those words, and then he got even more irascible. “I swear to God, lady, I’ll make ye wush ye was never born! You don’t know who yo’re talkin to. You might be some big somebody down thar to Little Rock, but this yere is Jasper, Newton County, by God, and I’m the by-God county jedge! Now, I got some words to say to Rindy aint nary bit of yore be-ness, and I aim to say ’em to her! Rindy! You thar now, Rindy! Gitch yore hide out chere!” Poor Dorinda was trembling something terrible and making little motions as if she were trying to obey him by getting up out of the bed, but she couldn’t really move. Viridis told him to leave or she’d call the manager. “Call him, goddammit!” Sull hollered at the top of his voice. “He’s a good friend of mine lak everbody else in this town! Call him and see what he does to ye! Snoopin meddler bitch!” Viridis put her hands up on his chest and gave him a shove that pushed him clean to the other side of the hall, and then she slammed the door and bolted it. She motioned for us to get back into the bed, and she took a step in our direction just in time to avoid the bullets that came blasting through the door. Sull fired three shots real quick that left three big holes in the door panel and broke the mirror on the dresser. Rindy screamed, and I guess I must have hollered myself. Viridis tilted the whole bed up on its side and got us down behind it, so it partly shielded us from the door. She crawled on her stomach to reach where she’d left her purse, and she opened that purse and took out her big six-shooter and cocked it and kept it pointed toward the door. But Sull didn’t fire any more shots. Some other people in the hotel down the hall must have come out to see what was happening and were yelling at him, and then a man, it must have been the owner, was yelling at him, “Jedge! Jedge, have you done gone crazy?” I couldn’t hear all the words out there in the hall, but finally the man said, “Git out of here, Jedge!” and repeated it a few times. Sull stepped back to the door, and his voice came through those bullet holes: “Rindy, now you lissen a me, gal! You jist keep yore trap shut, hear me? You keep that trap shut or I’ve got a bullet with yore name writ all over it!” Then it got quiet. After a while there was a knock and the manager asked if everything was okay. Viridis wouldn’t open the door. She asked the manager to summon the constable. The manager said there wasn’t no constable, just the sheriff. “Snow?” she said, and the manager called back through the door, “Yes ma’am. Want me to git him?” “Never mind,” she said, and she straightened up the bed and turned off the lamp and we tried our best to sleep.
But of course none of us could sleep. By and by Viridis asked, “Do you know any good stories you could tell?” and I told the best ghost story I could remember, and that passed some time. “Rindy?” Viridis said. “Do you know any stories?”
For a minute I thought she might have already fallen asleep, but she hadn’t. “Could I tell a real story?” she finally asked. “Not a tellin-story, no, not a windy, but the pure fack?” We didn’t tell her she couldn’t, so she did. “I’ll tell you’uns how it come about that Sull Jerram ruint me.”
From that night on, Dorinda and I were best friends again. We hardly had time to enjoy it, though, before Viridis took her off to Little Rock. Most people thought that Viridis took Dorinda to Little Rock as a kind of “living signature” on that petition to the governor. It looked to everybody as if all the governor would need in order to give Nail a full pardon would be a complete confession from Dorinda, in person. But a big part of the reason Viridis took her to Little Rock was to save her from Sull: Viridis was convinced that Sull would kill Dorinda to silence her if he had the chance.
When the word got around Stay More that we had spent the night at the Buckhorn and been fired upon by Sull, some people were of the mind that Viridis should have known better than to spend the night in Jasper, right in the hornet’s nest, you might say. If it had been them, some people said, they would have groped in the dark on hands and knees to get back to Stay More rather than spend the night in Jasper. But the Chisms, at least, protested that Viridis had no idea what she was getting into and was smart to hole up in the Buckhorn instead of risking her neck and ours on the road after dark.
Waymon Chism was fit to be tied, and that’s what they should have done to him. As soon as he heard what had happened, he disappeared. His wife Faye looked all over Stay More for him, and we heard from her how angry he was. Waymon didn’t own a horse or other conveyance; remember, he’d had to rent tho
se mules and that wagon from Willis Ingledew to go to Little Rock for Nail’s body, which wasn’t yet available. This time Willis said he hadn’t rented any mule or horse, either one. He just disappeared, and later word came that he had been seen, on foot, walking into Jasper. It’s an all-day hike if you leave early in the morning. He must have been too tired when he got there to do anything that would require physical strength, like wringing Sull’s neck. Which was, apparently, what he intended to do. He had no gun. A cousin in Jasper who gave him a bed for the night said that he had tried to persuade Waymon to borrow his pistol. Waymon refused and set out from the cousin’s house right after breakfast to walk the few blocks to Sull’s house. The cousin stalked him, from a distance, to see what was up. It was worse than walking into the hornet’s nest, except for one thing: the hornet was alone. He didn’t have Waymon’s sister sleeping with him anymore, he didn’t have children, he didn’t have an old mother to fight for her wayward son, and, best of all, he didn’t have Sheriff Duster Snow and his deputies to be his bodyguards and sidekicks, not that early in the morning. All he had was his gun. And Waymon got to him before he could even remember which pocket he’d left it in, in the clothes he took off the night before. Waymon got to him before he could get dressed. Waymon got to him before he could get word to God. The cousin described it: “Ole Waymon jist kicked the door down and walked right on in thar. Purty soon he had drug that jedge out to the front porch, whar he commenced to toss him amongst the furniture and reduce it to kindlin and flinders. Shore, ole Sull hit him back, or tried to. Sull got in a couple of licks, one of ’em a lucky round arm swing that knocked Waymon off the porch, but Waymon jist reached back up thar and grabbed Sull by his laig and flang him out into the yard, whar he really set in to clobberin the daylights outen that feller. I swear, I don’t see how Sull ever got off the ground again. He was jist laid plumb out, purt nigh boggy and half-dead, while Waymon stood thar and guv him a leetle lecture, a sermon I couldn’t hear on account of I was standin behind a tree too fur off, but Waymon hollered at him fer a good little bit, and Sull jist had to lay there and listen to it. Finally Waymon turned and stomped off. He was headin the opposite way from me, was the reason he couldn’t hear me when I hollered. He’d done already got too fur off and guv Sull time to git up and dash in the house for his shootin-piece and come back out and run right up behind pore Waymon, when I hollered as loud as I could, but he was too fur off from me to hear me. I reckon he did hear me, but by the time he commenced to turn around, Sull had done already shot him in the back.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 170