The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

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The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 190

by Donald Harington


  And we went. Rouser tried to follow and I told him to stay home but Viridis said he could go with us, so we let him trot along after Rosabone as she carried the two of us up the road toward the Chism place.

  But somebody was spying on us. I should have guessed, I should have been able to put myself inside of Sull Jerram’s crooked mind and figure out that if he and his courthouse gang were determined to keep Nail from returning, or to capture him as soon as he showed up and turn him back over to the authorities in Little Rock, they’d likely post a watch on Viridis and trail every move she made. By now everyone knew she was here. By now Sheriff Duster Snow had had plenty of time to tell his deputies to put Viridis under surveillance. Two deputies, we later learned, had taken up residence in Tilbert Jerram’s General Store, from which they could watch any comings or goings from the old woman’s house, and it was one of these deputies who was now following us, on his horse, as we rode Rosabone in the direction of what had once been Nail’s sheep pastures. Rouser caught wind of him and growled a little bit to attract my attention. I looked over my shoulder and saw the man on his horse, a good distance behind us. “Viridis,” I said, “we’re being followed.”

  She stopped and turned Rosabone. When she stopped, so did the distant rider. “Do you know who he is?” she asked.

  I couldn’t see him well enough to recognize him or even to know for sure that he was one of Snow’s deputies. “No, but I reckon he’s one of the law,” I said.

  “We’ll have to lose him,” she declared. “Where can we go to shake him off?”

  “That way,” I directed her, not pointing but just nodding my head slightly in the direction of a byroad that diverged from the Chisms’ lane and dropped down toward Butterchurn Holler. We rode Rosabone along the Butterchurn Holler trail for a mile, with the deputy still coming along behind us, hanging back but definitely following us. I knew there was a sharp bend ahead in the trail, and I told Viridis, “When we reach that big hickory up ahead, right past it let’s cut quick into the woods.”

  She spoke over her shoulder: “I’m afraid I don’t know a hickory from an elm. You’ll have to say when.”

  I told her when. We left the road and plunged into the deep woods that rose up the north side of Butterchurn Holler. The climb was steep, and we both dismounted and led Rosabone up to the top of the ridge, where we paused and waited for fifteen or twenty minutes to see if the deputy had discovered which way we had gone. But there was no further sign of him. He must have followed the Butterchurn Holler trail onward. We remounted Rosabone and rode across the ridge until we could double back and regain the Chism lane and cross it into Nail’s sheep pastures. As we rode across the pasture, I watched carefully in every direction for signs of any other deputy or spy.

  The pasture rose, rolling, through the high weeds and brush that had taken over the place since Nail’s sheep had died. The Chisms ought to have bought a few sheep or goats just to graze it and keep it from going back to the wild, or at least they should have mowed it for hay. “What is all this ferny stuff?” Viridis asked, and I explained that it was yarrow, which Nail had planted for his sheep to supplement their diet; but it had grown tall and its leaves, a grayish shade of green, were rank. “Yarrow’s a pretty name for a plant,” she said, and I told her that some women and girls used yarrow as the main ingredient in a love medicine. “Love medicine?” Viridis laughed, and I had to explain to her how you could concoct beverages that had the power to influence the man of your choice.

  She didn’t take me very seriously. Then as we went on she asked me to identify other weeds and grasses, and I told her the names of all the pretty ones: chicory and butterfly weed, coreopsis and oldfield toadflax. “Really? Is it really called oldfield toadflax?” she asked, and I said that was what I’d always known it to be called.

  Then we were drawn into that uppermost corner of the field, where it nestles against the side of the mountain, lined on two sides by thick, close hardwoods that seem to make a cul-de-sac in the corner but actually open into an old trail. But I didn’t direct Viridis toward that trail opening, just yet. “Let’s wait here a bit,” I suggested, and dismounted from Rosabone. “You just sit there on her for a while, and I’m gonna check to make sure nobody’s watching you.”

  Viridis did as I told her, and I crept over behind the tree line at the edge of the field and followed it for a good ways back along the slope of the pasture, with Rouser at my heels. I moved from tree to tree, keeping myself hidden and looking out across the field to catch sight of anyone else. But there was no one. We were alone up there. “Smell anybody?” I asked Rouser, and he planted himself and raised his nose into the air as if he understood my question. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had shaken his head in reply, but he just gave me a blank, dumb, doggy look as if to say no, he didn’t smell anybody. I went back to Viridis and motioned for her to follow me, and we crossed the tree line and entered the deep woods.

  There had been some logging activity not too long ago in this part of the woods, which had all second-or third-growth trees, not very tall, and thin. The earth here was still gouged by wheel ruts from the heavy-laden lumber wagons. But after following the main logging-trail for less than a mile, we found ourselves in a holler that had no path except what remained of some ancient passage, perhaps of Indians. The deeper we got into this holler, the taller the trees stood, until we were in rare virginal woodland: towering stands of oak, ash, and hickory, hung with huge grapevines and blackjack vines that had given up trying to climb the trees and made the place look like a jungle. Either these trees were too hard for the loggers to get at or whoever owned the land had not permitted logging. I didn’t know who owned the land. Not the Chisms, whose acres we had left far down below.

  If these virgin trees were singing, they sang only with fragrance, not with sound. It was eerily quiet and still in this forest, a silence matching the darkness: although it was well past midmorning and the sun was high in the sky, the canopy of the forest shaded everything except a random patch of sunlight here and there.

  A small branch meandered through the holler, and its gentle gurgling was the only sound besides the clop of Rosabone’s hooves on an occasional slab of chert. The branch was the runoff of the falls, which were still out of earshot. Along the banks of the branch grew wildflowers, and Viridis asked me to name them for her: my voice seemed to have an echo, nearly a boom in the silence, as I pronounced, “Bee Balm, Mallow, Lady Slipper, Fireweed…” We were deep into a rich, woodsy fragrance that was only partly flowers; the rest was moss and leaf mold and fern and the silent singing of the trees. I mentioned to Viridis in passing that the lady slipper’s roots are used in concocting one of the most powerful love medicines ever known, a surefire aphrodisiac…although I didn’t know that word, not then. “It makes a body right warm and lusting” was the way I put it, blushing furiously in the effort.

  It was almost eleven o’clock when we came to the glade, or glen, which was illuminated by the full sun: the northeast end of the holler terminated in cliffs, and over the lowest ridge of the bluff spilled the waterfall, a white square fifteen feet high, dazzling in the sunlight. On both sides of the waterfall the cliff was deeply undercut into caverns, sunless grottoes in which Indians once had lived and which still contained the shattered relics of their habitation: bits of woven stuff, shards of pottery, bones. Viridis was entranced. Rouser was having a field day, sniffing around.

  “Here we are,” I declared.

  “Nail?” she softly called, but of course there was no answer. She tested the water of the falls with her hand, and so did I; it was much, much colder than my shower bath falls. “Is it safe to drink?” she asked. We were both very thirsty from our ride and hike. Rosabone had not waited for my answer but was already lowering her head to drink from the deep, blue pool at the base of the falls.

  “It’s springwater,” I said. We knelt and cupped our hands to drink. The water was delicious: cold and fresh and pure. There wasn’t even a minnow swim
ming in it, nor a waterbug. A flitting dragonfly was the only creature besides us around the pool. But in the mud at the edge there were some tracks, of more than one animal. I wasn’t very good at recognizing animal tracks, and some of these I’d never seen before. Rouser was practically rooting his snout in the tracks and holding his tail very still, which he does when he’s trying to think.

  Viridis didn’t seem to notice the tracks, and I wasn’t going to scare her with the thought that we might be surrounded by wolves, bears, or panthers, not to mention gowrows, jimplicutes, and snawfusses. The latter three were just as real to me as the former three, but I had never seen any of them, although I’d heard wolves howling at night far across the ridges.

  We were sitting now on the log of a fallen tree, while Rosabone with her reins loose wandered around the pool and Rouser went off out of sight to pursue the trail of one of the animals. “It’s so peaceful here,” Viridis observed, smiling and taking a deep breath as if the air were peaceful too.

  “This would be a perfect place for Nail to hide if he—” Her voice caught, she choked, then sobbed once, loudly, and I thought sure she was going to cry, but she stopped herself and sniffled, using her wrist to rub away whatever had been ready to run from her eyes or nose. Then sadly she said, “Maybe he’ll never see it.”

  “He’s already seen it,” I said. “He knows every inch of this mountain.” I thought of what I’d said to him in my letter: “I didn’t stay up there very long, but while I was there I thought of you, a lot, and I had a strange vision as if I could see you just living and dwelling in that hidden glade.” I told Viridis, “If he’s alive, and if he goes anywhere, he’ll come here. He might even be on his way here right this minute.”

  We waited. It was almost as if we’d been told he’d come at high noon and we had just a few minutes to wait for him. Meanwhile Viridis asked me to identify everything that I could see from where I was sitting: she wanted to learn the names of everything visible that could be named. There were some ferns growing around the pool that were so uncommon I didn’t know their name, and there was even a flower, some kind of twayblade, that I couldn’t identify, but I told her everything I knew in that green glen.

  And she knew things I didn’t, that every shade of that green had a name, some shades of green I’d never heard of before, that she pointed out to me: cinnabar, Aubusson, smaragd, cobalt, Hooker’s, palmetto, Véronèse, teal, gamboge, shades of green that only an artist would know but that would come in handy if you wanted to remember the difference between a frond of fern and a bough of cedar. Cinnabar is a very reddish green, and I didn’t even know that green could be red, its complement, until Viridis pointed it out to me.

  We were learning things from each other. But it was past noon now, and we were both hungry for dinner, and I hadn’t brought my .22 with me to shoot something to eat, and even if Rouser had trotted back with a possum in his mouth I wouldn’t have known how to cook it. It would be way past dinnertime before we got back home, and we’d be starved.

  A blue lizard frightened Viridis into leaving the place. It was just a harmless little skink that crawled out from under a rock and flicked its tongue at her, but maybe she had never seen a lizard before: she jumped up with a squeal of terror and ran several feet before stopping. Of course by then she’d scared the daylights out of the poor skink, who’d slunk back to his hidey hole. “It was just a lizard,” I said. “They won’t bite.”

  “Up close he looked like a small dragon,” she said, recovering herself, and then, apologetically, “Well, we’d better go, don’t you think?”

  I nodded and called for Rouser. He came back from wherever he’d been tracking whatever, and Viridis took Rosabone’s reins and said, “I wish there were some way I could let him know that I was here, in case he comes.”

  “Well,” I said. I began picking up small rocks, and I arranged them beside the pool of the falls into a large letter V. “If he sees that, he’ll know it stands for you.”

  Viridis studied my handiwork, and then she bent to gather some other stones and make beside the V another letter, a large L.

  I was flattered, but I protested, “He won’t know what that stands for.”

  “If he doesn’t,” she said, “let him think it stands for love.”

  I blushed red.

  Each morning thereafter Viridis went to that remote glen of the waterfall, but without me. I understood. Sometimes I guess I overstood: I let my imagination run away with me in picturing the first meeting between Viridis and Nail, the first time they’d ever been allowed to touch without someone watching them. What kind of touch would it be? They sure wouldn’t simply shake hands. And it would probably be more than a hug. It would probably be more than even my imagination could guess, and I understood why Viridis did not invite me to go back with her to that glen. But there was another reason: she could ride Rosabone a lot easier and swifter without me behind. She had to elude those deputies who watched her every move from their lookout at Tilbert Jerram’s store. Both of those deputies had good horses, but they weren’t jumpers like Rosabone, and that mare would really give them chase. Viridis would point her west, or north, or south, or any direction except her northeastward destination, and then lead those poor deputies on a pursuit that would take them all over the Stay More countryside before they quit and realized they had long since lost her. Without me riding behind, Rosabone could jump pretty near anything that stood in her way: fallen trees and fences and creeks and brush piles that would impede or completely stop those men trying to follow her. Not once did those deputies come anywhere near discovering Viridis’ actual destination in the green glen of the waterfall.

  Viridis would go on alone into the glen after shaking off her pursuers. It scared her a good bit, going alone through that dark forest to that place where possibly fiercer creatures than blue lizards dwelt. On the forest path once, Rosabone shied and reared up and nearly threw Viridis: there was a copperhead in the path, and those snakes are sure enough a lot less harmless than lizards: a copperhead’s bite can kill you.

  When she got to the glen, Viridis would give herself and Rosabone a good long drink from the pool and then just hang around awhile, looking for signs that Nail or any other man had been there. Each time she went there she would take something and leave it, in the largest cavern beside the falls, like a bird building a nest: she would pack in a blanket one day, another blanket the next day, and eventually all of the things she had meant to leave under the sycamore tree behind the penitentiary: the hunting knife, the harmonica, the pocketknife with can opener attachment, and the few cans of corned beef and beans and such, as well as the compass, the pocket watch, soap, salt and pepper, and a few yards of mosquito netting (the mosquitoes were getting bad). On each trip she would check carefully to see if any of these items had been used or even touched. Disappointed, she would just sit for an hour or so listening to the trees, and waiting, before heading home.

  Only one item that she had intended to leave for Nail and Ernest she did not place in the cavern but carried with her at all times: the Smith & Wesson revolver. Having the gun with her allayed the terror of encountering a panther, bear, or wolf. Against a pack of wolves the gun wouldn’t be much help, but it was better than nothing. She kept it in a small saddlebag attached to the back of Rosabone’s jumping-saddle, where she also sometimes carried a sandwich, in case she was gone past dinnertime.

  Returning from the falls, she would be just as careful as she had been going to them, to make sure that she wasn’t watched or her route discovered. She would take a circuitous path that brought her out north of Nail’s sheep pastures, and then she would come back across those pastures to the Chism house and stop to say hello and perhaps make sure that he hadn’t shown up there.

  On one of these visits to the Chism house she discovered that Seth Chism was in pretty bad shape. Nail’s father had been ailing for quite some time, and now it appeared that he might not survive. Doc Plowright had been to see him, but now the Ch
isms had sent for young Doc Swain, who was there when Viridis arrived and who later talked to her alone back in town.

  “They call it heart dropsy,” Doc Swain said to her. “Leastways, that’s what…my colleague across the road yonder calls it.” He gestured toward Doc Plowright’s clinic. “I reckon that’s what he’s always heared it called, and he keeps on callin it that even though he must know it’s actual a pericarditis. Or maybe he don’t know that. Anyhow, ole Seth’s heart is shore to fail. Now, I reckon if Nail was to show up, he could get better. But if he don’t, his heart is bound to fail.”

  “Mine is bound to fail too,” she said.

  Doc Swain, who wasn’t any older than she was, looked at her with compassion. “It better not,” he said gently. “There aint nothin I could give ye for your heart.”

  The old woman had a visitor that night. Or maybe he meant to visit Viridis, but the way he acted, it was the old woman he had driven all the way from Jasper to see. Judge Lincoln Villines drove the car himself, and he came alone. He must have left early in the afternoon, to drive that car over all the ridges and through all the creeks between Jasper and Stay More. He arrived just a bit too late for supper. The old woman and Viridis were taking their coffee out on the porch when he pulled into the yard. Of course they recognized him from the previous time he’d been on that porch: it was almost as if those five or six months had not intervened since he had last stood there in the company of the sheriff and the county judge; it was almost as if they could still hear him snapping at the latter, “Shut yore fool mouth, Sull! Aint you done made enough trouble already? Jist shut up, afore ye go and make it worse!”

  But now he spoke mildly, although the subject of his speaking had not changed: “Ladies, good evenin and howdy. I trust ye aint had no trouble lately from…my colleague, Jedge Jerram?”

  “He knows better than to show himself in my sight again,” the old woman said.

  Lincoln Villines smiled at her and waited to see if she would offer him a chair. She did not. He turned to Viridis. “And you, young lady? Has he given you ary bad time?”

 

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