Enduring

by Donald Harington

  They had one run-in with a Boone County sheriff’s deputy on a return trip, who stopped them and correctly surmised that all the sacks of cornmeal they were carrying were destined for Chism’s still. He warned them not to bring that cornmeal back to Harrison in liquid form.

  Driving back into Stay More they met Judge Sull Jerram in his automobile. He didn’t stop, he only waved, and he had a girl with him, and the girl was Dorinda Whitter, on her way to Jasper at last.

  Nail recognized her. He recalled the time when he had been walking from the village up to his sheep pasture and he stopped to pick a Golden Delicious apple from somebody’s orchard, and right after that he ran into Dorinda Whitter with her friend Latha Bourne. Rindy Whitter had said to him, “Nail, we need for you to settle a dispute. Which one of us two gals is the purtiest’un?”

  Nail looked them over real well like he’d never seen them before. He took note of Rindy’s ample bosom and of Latha’s well-turned limbs. He declared, “That aint a fair question. Both of you gals are the purtiest creatures in all of Newton County and maybe far beyond too. Ask me which is purtier, the sunrise or the sunset? It depends on the weather.” And he refused to declare a winner of the contest, although he gave his apple to Latha. She assumed he meant for them to share it, so she let Rindy have several big bites of it.

  Word got back to Irene Chism Jerram, Nail’s sister who was married to Sull, that her husband had been seen in the company of Dorinda Whitter, cavorting around Jasper. She asked Nail if it were true, and her brother said it was, a sad thing because Dorinda Whitter wasn’t but thirteen years old. Nail told his sister that he had had his fill of her husband and didn’t intend to run any more bootleg whiskey for him.

  Then Nail confronted Sull and told him that he’d had enough, and he didn’t aim to run any more goods for him. Sull said he was sorry but there wasn’t nobody else but Nail who could do it, so Nail didn’t have no choice in the matter. Nail told him he wanted him to quit courting Dorinda Whitter. Sull laughed and asked Nail if he himself was sweet on her. Nail replied that he wasn’t but he was sweet on his sister Irene and he didn’t want Sull treating his wife like that.

  “Yo’re welcome to Irene,” Sull said. “Nobody else wants her.”

  Then Nail hit Sull. Just once, but hard enough to lay him out. The sheriff, who was in cahoots with Sull, threw Nail in jail. Nail threatened to report all those involved in the bootlegging operation to the federal law. They let him stew in the jail for a week or more, hoping he’d change his mind about that threat.

  Latha, who tried to avoid saying anything to Rindy that might make her feel bad, refrained from criticizing her for her flirtation with Judge Sull Jerram. Years before, Rindy had warned Latha that she should never try to tell Rindy what to do or what not to do, and Latha tried to honor that request, but she couldn’t help warning Rindy about the dangers of her “carrying on” with Sull. “But he loves me!” Rindy protested. “He told me so.” Latha tried using the argument that Sull Jerram just wanted Rindy for her body, but Rindy replied that she didn’t mind and in fact was eager to spread her legs for the judge…or at least to lift her dress if she wasn’t in a position to spread her legs.

  When Nail Chism was finally released from jail, there was an afternoon in June when Latha and Rindy were on their way to their playhouse for a final visit, having decided that they were too old for playhouses and dolls and play-like tea parties and all that childish stuff. They were taking a shortcut, a cowpath that led up through a grove of walnut trees, when they were met by Nail Chism, walking with his gangling strides down the cowpath toward them. “Howdy, girls,” was all he said, not pausing to chitchat or make any comment on their previous meeting at which they had asked him to decide which of them was prettier. He simply walked on around them and on down the cowpath, as if he had somewhere to get to in a hurry. As they continued walking up the cowpath, Rindy kept looking over her shoulder, as if they might be followed. Finally they reached the playhouse and went inside, where Rindy continued to peer out the one little window.

  “Nail Chism wouldn’t follow us,” Latha protested.

  But Rindy whimpered and pointed and there, down below, far off at the edge of the meadow, was a man, staring up toward the playhouse. They couldn’t tell who it was. It could have been Nail, but they couldn’t tell. He didn’t seem to have blond hair. They stared at him for a long time, until finally he disappeared into the woods. Rindy was clearly unsettled, and asked Latha to come and spend the night with her. Latha had to go home and ask her mother for permission. Her mother knew that the Whitter boys were hanging out in Jasper, and therefore that the possibility of transgression was removed from the Whitter household, so she gave Latha permission, provided she did her chores first: milking the cow, slopping the hogs, and gathering eggs.

  When she finally got to Rindy’s house, a two-part dogtrot similar to Every’s, she saw that there were several horses tied to the hitching post in the front yard, and she wondered if the Whitter boys had come home from Jasper. She discovered inside the house that one of the horses belonged to Doc Plowright, another belonged to Hoy Murrison, a Stay More sheriff’s deputy, and the third belonged to Doc Alonzo Swain, who was justice of the peace. Latha said to Mrs. Whitter, “Did Rindy tell ye, I’ve come to spend the night?”

  Mrs. Whitter looked at her as if she’d said she was flying off to the moon, and then looked vacantly at her and said, bursting into tears, “Latha, hon, my baby has been ravaged.”

  Chapter eleven

  Sheriff Duster Snow, who, Latha had heard, was in cahoots with Sull Jerram and the rest of the bootlegging gang, sat with Latha on the edge of the porch and asked her a bunch of questions. When had Latha last seen Dorinda Whitter? Where was this here playhouse of their’n? Did Latha see anybody else in the vicinity of the playhouse? Yes, Latha had seen a man far off at the bottom of the pasture, but she couldn’t recognize him. Didn’t she think that man could’ve been Nail Chism?

  “What makes you think it was Nail Chism?” Latha wanted to know.

  “You let me ask the questions, gal,” the sheriff said sternly. “Did you think it could have been him?” Latha allowed that it could’ve been him. It could’ve been any man. Did Latha understand what an awful thing had been done to that pore gal? Latha nodded her head uncertainly because she didn’t know if he meant did Latha know what rape was or did she understand how awful it had been. Finally the Sheriff told her that if anybody asked her who it was, she should say Nail Chism. She tried to protest, but the sheriff cut her off. “He was the one who done it, no doubt about it. No doubt whatsoever. He’s already confessed. Now you just tell ’em he’s the one you saw if anybody asts ye. Hear me?”

  Latha didn’t see Rindy again for several days, when a grand jury was convened in Jasper, and a Stay More lawyer, Jim Tom Duckworth, who had been hired to defend Nail, gave Latha (and her sisters Barb and Mandy as chaperones) a buggy ride into Jasper, her very first visit to the county seat. She remembered the play-like visit that Every had taken her on with his stick horse, and it seemed that everything, including the courthouse and jail, looked pretty much as he had let her imagine it.

  When Rindy appeared, she was wincing at every step as if it pained her to move, and Latha truly believed that something awful had been done to her, whether it was Nail or not. In her testimony, Rindy claimed it was Nail, that he had waylaid her on her way home and tried to force her to suck on his dinger, and when she protested he conked her with a rock on top of her head to get her to open her mouth. He came first that way, and then he made her lie down and he made her come with his mouth, and then he stuck his dinger where his mouth had been and attempted to take her virginity and then took it with much loss of blood.

  The defense attorney, Jim Tom Duckworth, argued that it was unlikely she was still a virgin at the advanced age of thirteen and with six brothers. Latha had witnessed her loss of virginity, so she knew Rindy was lying. Rindy’s whole description of the scene seemed to be made up and reh
earsed, as if somebody had told her what to say. Latha was trying to determine why her best friend would be so dishonest and could only conclude that Sull Jerram had put her up to it.

  Latha was briefly called on to testify but maintained that the man she had seen from the playhouse window, far out in the pasture down below, was not blond and could have been anybody, not necessarily Nail Chism. She pointed at Sull Jerram, who was sitting in the audience, “For all I know, it was just as likely him.”

  Despite the establishment of an alibi (fifteen of the gentlemen who had loafed with Nail at his usual time on the store porch at Stay More testified that he had been loafing with them at the supposed time of the crime), the grand jury voted to indict Nail for sodomy, perversion, assault, battery, and sexual violation of a female beneath the age of consent and against her will. Trial was set for August.

  Latha and Rindy never visited the playhouse again, and the first time the former saw the latter after the hearing was later that summer when Rindy showed up at Latha’s house with a Sears, Roebuck catalogue and asked for Latha’s help in picking out her clothes for the trial. She had been given money by “them” in order to buy herself some nice clothes. Latha wanted to help her pick out a good dress. But Latha wanted even more to hear Rindy confess that it was not Nail who had raped her. Rindy refused.

  That was the August that somewhere across the ocean they were starting the Great War to End All Wars. The men on the store porch did not spend much time discussing that war. They discussed the trial and they wondered at the speed with which the jury found Nail guilty and the judge sentenced him to be taken to the Arkansas State Penitentiary in Little Rock and there put to death.

  Latha didn’t see Rindy again until school started. Miss Blankinship had gotten herself married and was replaced by a Mr. Perry, who insisted they sit together by grade, not by friendship, and Latha had decided she wouldn’t sit with Rindy by either.

  Once at recess Rindy said to her, “Latha, how come everbody acts like I done something wrong? How come it’s my fault I got raped?

  Latha just looked her in the eye for a while before she asked, “Did you get yourself raped?”

  “Yes!” Rindy yelled, and the other kids stopped what they were doing to look at the two girls. “Honest! I did! It hurt! It hurt me real bad!” Rindy burst into tears. Whether or not she had faked her crying in the courtroom, she wasn’t pretending now.

  “What’s the trouble here?” Mr. Perry said. Being new, he hadn’t heard anything about the trial, or about how Judge Sull Jerram had such power he could rape anybody he wanted.

  “She hurts,” Latha said. And that’s all she said.

  But soon enough Mr. Perry was able to find out the source of Dorinda’s problems and he felt sorry for her, if nobody else did. He was able to learn quite a lot about the whole story, and he set aside fifteen minutes of each school day for a “current events” session, discussing the incarceration and pending execution of Nail Chism, and the war in Europe. The students were totally indifferent to the latter, which did not concern them or interest them in the slightest; as for the former, everybody in Stay More believed that the gentle shepherd Nail Chism was innocent and had been “framed,” which did not mean that his picture was edged with ornament but that he had been falsely incriminated for the benefit of Judge Sull Jerram’s gang of bootleggers. Bit by bit, the students argued his case to Mr. Perry until the teacher finally saw the light. Thereafter Mr. Perry devoted most of “current events” to any reports from the capitol concerning Nail’s appointment with the electric chair.

  Electric chair? Since there was no electricity in Newton County, the students could not understand this. Had Mr. Perry ever seen electricity? Yes, during the one year he was at college, the town where the college was located had electricity, which powered artificial light. Mr. Perry told them the story of Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of electricity, who had discovered it with his kite dangling a key in a thunderstorm. The students began to wonder if this “electric chair” might simply be a chair to which the prisoner is tied and is left out during a thunderstorm to be hit by lightning. To test the notion, a bunch of students took Earl Bullen, a second grader who was the most unpopular kid in the school, and tied him to a chair and left him out in a thunderstorm. They had to gag him too, because he was yelling his head off. The lightning crashed all around him and even knocked down a couple of trees, but it didn’t hit Earl. When Mr. Perry found out what they had done, he explained that electricity is not simply in the lightning. It has to be “harnessed” and sent through wires. So the next time there was a thunderstorm they wrapped a lot of wire around Earl and put him in the chair again, and left the chair out in a meadow. The wires were run out in all directions to catch the lightning, and this time a bolt must have managed to hit one of those wires, because it left a burn where it was wrapped around Earl’s arm, but he wasn’t put to death. However, his daddy learned about the event and gave Mr. Perry a tongue-lashing, although Mr. Perry hadn’t known anything about the attempted electrocution.

  Latha had watched but not participated in these science experiments, and they haunted her dreams. She truly felt much sorrow and affection for Nail Chism, and the whole idea of the electric chair terrified her. If they wanted to kill Nail, why didn’t they just shoot him or hang him?

  The part of current events that she liked most, was the story of how Nail Chism was put in the clectric chair but before the switch could be pulled a last-minute reprieve came in from the governor and spared him. This involved a young woman who did illustrations for the big newspaper down to Little Rock called the Gazette; a woman named Viridis Monday who would start a campaign to get Nail spared and even liberated from the terrible prison he was in.

  But as time went by—weeks and then months—there was no further word from Little Rock. Each day during “current events” at school, Latha’s hand was the first to go up, to ask if anybody had heard anything about Nail, but nobody had. In time the newspaper lady, Viridis Monday, came to Stay More, riding a horse, to find out all she could about Nail and about the case against him, and to interview all the people who, like Latha, believed he was innocent. She managed to extract a confession from Rindy that the trial had been a set-up, and she even took Rindy with her back to Little Rock to meet the governor. Sometimes Rindy sent her a postcard but she never said if Nail had been pardoned. Latha tried to determine if she was really envious of Rindy for being able to live in Little Rock and even go to school there. She had been careful not to watch Viridis and Rindy leave Stay More, because she hoped to see both of them again. The next summer she bent down a pair of mullein stalks and named them after Viridis and Nail and waited to see if they would grow up again, but they did not.

  Chapter twelve

  Long before Gran commenced telling me her life’s story, back when she was still in her nineties, I had urged her to write her own story about Nail Chism and Viridis Monday. I would have been glad to do it, but I wanted her to do it herself for several reasons; for one thing, she had a way with words that was much better than mine, and for another thing, there might have been parts to the story that she wouldn’t have wanted to tell me aloud, and for still another thing it would give her something to do to fill up her days, although she was rarely idle, what with her garden and her cats and her daily sessions of telling me this whole story.

  She took my suggestion and devoted the next three years to filling page after page with the story, and when she had finished it, and let me read it, I was amazed. It was a great story. She called it Shades of Green, but because one of the first things revealed in it was that the first time Nail Chism sat in that electric chair, he could hear trees singing, and he wasn’t just imagining it, either, because Viridis Monday confirmed that there was a strange music coming from somewhere far off which sounded like men and women raising their voices in song, the publisher persuaded her to change the title to The Choiring of the Trees, and that was the title under which it may still be purchased or found in
libraries. I couldn’t put it down. I have reread it more times than I can count.

  In it, she tells about bending down those two mullein stalks. She said to one of them, “Your name is Viridis,” and she said to the other one, “Your name is Nail.” After bending them down to the ground, she said, “I hope you don’t stay down too long.”

  Latha wasn’t necessarily more superstitious than anybody else. We all of us attempt to make a connection between our luck and something concrete, such as the garments we are wearing. In Latha’s case, all of the several superstitions that she subscribed to were based upon fact or reality. If wearing a certain ribbon in her hair coincided with something good happening, then she expected that ribbon to make other good things happen whenever she wore it.

  Latha had never used tobacco in any form, but she had once smoked a mullein cigarette, because her grandmother told her it would be good for her cough. In fact, it made her cough worse than ever, but perhaps she got the cough out of her system, because the cough went away.

  Mullein tea is also good for the nerves, and the plant or the roots can be used effectively to make eardrops and for toothache. Some people called the mullein “hag’s taper” because according to old stories, witches had used it as the wick for their candles. There was considerable controversy over whether the mullein leaves resembled flannel or velvet. Once Latha and Rindy had taken pieces of flannel and velvet and held them up against a tall mullein plant, but they couldn’t make up their minds; the mullein was too rough to be velvet but too smooth to be flannel.