The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  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.

  But Latha knew one thing for sure: if you name a mullein stalk after somebody who is missing, or lost, or disappeared, or even dead, and then bend it down, that person will be found or will appear if the mullein stalk straightens up again.

  Those two mullein stalks she named after Viridis and Nail were beside a path that led to Latha’s bathing place. There was a small waterfall in a holler behind the house, not far from the vegetable garden where she worked every morning all summer, alone. Barb and Mandy refused to work outside the house, but Latha took responsibility for the garden, and every morning went out to chop and pull weeds and care for it. She would wear her sunbonnet for protection from the summer sun, but her dress would become soaked with sweat after a couple of hours, and she would go to that little waterfall, remove the dress and her underdrawers, and get all wet beneath that waterfall, using lye soap to get the dirt off. Her dog Rouser always went with her, and he would have barked if anybody had spied on her nakedness.

  Of course she never stood under the waterfall when she was having her monthlies. That was one common superstition that she subscribed to: It is practically suicide to bathe during your period, and she knew of at least two girls who had come down with paralysis or consumption for ignoring that fact.

  Each time she went to her bathing place she would say howdy to the two bent-down mullein stalks and to tell them how much she hoped they would straighten up. But the whole story of just what happened after those mullein stalks both got erections is so much at the heart of The Choiring of the Trees that it would not be fair for me to spoil it for you.

  As far as Enduring is concerned, let’s just say that Rindy finally did come home, and managed to finish school through the eighth grade, which was as far as it went, but she had become “citified” after her years in Little Rock, and the other kids did not like her, and of course Latha never was able to be her friend again.

  I asked Gran, “What happened to the playhouse?”

  “I reckon you could still find traces of it littering the ground beneath that big oak tree up on the hill, but I haven’t been up there for years, and I doubt if Rindy ever did go up there again herself. She ran away and got married to some fellow who lived in Pettigrew, and I never saw her again.”

  Then Gran became silent and I wondered if she were waiting for me to say something. So I told her how hard it would be for me to tell her life’s story leaving Nail and Viridis out of it.

  “Why do you have to leave them out?” she wanted to know.

  “Because you’ve already told all of it in The Choiring of the Trees, and I don’t want to spoil your story.”

  Gran smiled. “It was a thrilling story, and you don’t want to take the thrill out of it?”

  “I just don’t want to cool it off. I want people to read The Choiring of the Trees and feel the excitement for themselves.”

  Chapter thirteen

  The next time that the month of May rolled around, Latha did not, for the first time in years, leave a May basket hanging from the doorknob at Rindy Whitter’s house. In the Ozarks, May Day was a bigger observance than Valentine’s Day. For Valentine’s, the only thing that happened was that a feller would take his sweetheart to a big tree somewheres and at the height of her head he would carve with his Barlow knife two linked hearts with their initials inside of them. The trees around Stay More village were covered with hearts that somebody down through the ages had carved, but only one of them had Latha’s initials in it. Every had never asked for he
r permission but he had carved “E.D.” + “L.B.” on one of the trees, and she had put her head up against it and discovered that it was at exactly her height. How had he known that? He could have just guessed.

  But each May Day eve you were supposed to hang at least one May basket on the door of your friends, boyfriends and girlfriends, and you were supposed to do it secretly and then run away without being discovered except by the dog, who would always bark at you. The May basket was woven of wild iris or yucca leaves, buck brush or honey-suckle runners and then was filled with wildflowers: phlox of several colors, verbena, sweet William, spotted crane’s bill, baby blue iris and ferns. Latha and Rindy had always hung May baskets on one another’s doorknobs, but it wasn’t much of a secret because they could each guess that the other had done it, even if the dogs hadn’t barked at them. The year Rindy came back from Little Rock, Latha did not make a May basket. Her momma observed that she had not and said, “You could go leave one on the Ingledews’ door. Aint Raymond sweet on you?” Latha said maybe he was, but he didn’t make May baskets. May Day morning she discovered a fine May basket hanging on her door, and was abashed, because she hadn’t left one for Rindy, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized that this basket didn’t look like any of the ones that Rindy had made over the years. Her mother winked at her and suggested that maybe Raymond had left it, and Latha could only reply that Raymond probably didn’t know how to weave wild iris and yucca leaves. Latha liked the fact that May baskets were supposed to be anonymous and therefore it was nice that she didn’t know who had put this one together. But the next time she saw Raymond, at the Coes’ play-party, she smiled real big at him, and he smiled back at her, but that didn’t mean anything.

  The play-party had the usual dances, and young folks from five or six miles away came to it, some on horseback or in wagons, but most afoot. The girls wore their best dresses and the boys wore their best duckins, or dungarees. Latha put some of the flowers from the May basket into her hair. The Coes’ cabin wasn’t big enough to hold the crowd, so the play-party was held in the yard, in the moonlight, which the Coes had calculated with their almanac. The Coes furnished cold meat sandwiches and real lemonade, although some of the boys brought Mason jars of Chism’s whiskey, which they passed around, and Latha even tried a taste, at the age of thirteen. They danced to “Skip to my Lou” and “Little Red Wagon” and “The Miller Boy,” but Raymond did not choose her as his partner. The girls he did choose weren’t nearly as pretty as she was, but they all had “reputations.” She danced to “Old Dan Tucker” with Every, but it didn’t involve any touching other than the palms of the hands overhead, and they kept changing partners constantly, so she wasn’t really with Every. But at one part of the dance they were close enough together so that he would say, “Them are nice flowers you got in yore hair.”

  She gave him a sidelong glance and said, “I wonder who picked them.”

  “I wonder,” was all he said, but for the rest of the evening she was convinced that he had been the creator of her May basket. The game-dances of the play-party were very strenuous, and often the couples had to take a rest, going off by themselves to sit on rocks or logs, or even, in some cases, going off into the woods. Latha noticed that Raymond seemed to have disappeared altogether. When she took her rest, Every came up and sat beside her, and she didn’t mind. But when he asked her if she’d care to go for a stroll in the woods, she had to remind him that they had both been forbidden, three years before, from associating with each other.

  “You think they’d shoot me if I was to walk you home?” he asked plaintively.

  When the play-party was all finished, late in the night, she let Every walk her home, since he was going in that direction anyway. And when they got to her house, she gave him a kiss goodnight.

  The next morning, she couldn’t help telling her mother that Every had been the only one at the play-party who showed any interest in her. Her mother reminded her yet again, as if she needed reminding, that she had better just forget ever having Every for a beau, for several reasons apart from the long-standing prohibition of her father: Every was her cousin, even if twice removed, and the Dills were the lowest of the low on the Stay More social ladder, such as it was, and the world is full of boys who are better-looking than Every.

  When Latha graduated from the eighth grade at the Stay More school, she decided that she would like to go to high school in Jasper if only she had a way to get there. In those days, very few students ever went to high school. If you finished the eighth grade in your hometown, you were considered to have completed your education, and it was even possible to get a job as a schoolteacher—not very well-paying but still a job with only eight grades of schooling. Only privileged students attended high school, and “privilege” meant access to some sort of transportation to take you ten miles from your home to the Jasper school. It was much too far to walk. Every said he’d be glad to drive her but Every still had a year to finish in the Stay More school. He tried to get his dad’s permission to loan her the Dill’s horse, so she could ride the horse to school, but his dad thought that was a ridiculous request, even if it was nice of Every to think about it.

  Just a week before the fall semester would begin at the high school, Raymond Ingledew came to Latha’s house one afternoon, and said, “I aint got nothing better to do, and I’ve got a one-horse shay that would get us to Jasper and back, if you’d like for me to drive ye.”

  “But how would I get home?” she asked. “I mean, what would you do while school is in session? I mean, getting to Jasper is one thing, but waiting six or seven hours until school lets out is another.”

  “Why, I s’pose I could just go to the high school too, if they’d have me.”

  Her parents were overwhelmed by this generous offer, and although it was unheard of for a girl to ride off with a boy without a chaperone, Latha’s parents were so awed by Raymond’s social standing in Stay More that they assumed he was a decent gentleman.

  She stopped short of telling her daddy and momma that Raymond was “twitchet-struck,” that is, he couldn’t think of anything else but sex. She didn’t think she’d enjoy having a school-bus driver who’d be too busy trying to mislead her to keep the shay on the road. But how else would she get to Jasper? After all, Raymond was awfully good-looking, and she reckoned that part of the privilege of feeling grown up was feeling like you could ward off approaches if you had to. So she told him in advance that if he didn’t keep his hands to himself she would get out of the shay and walk.

  So they both enrolled at Jasper High School, a twenty-year-old freshman among fifteen-year-old freshmen (although Latha had not turned fourteen yet). Throughout the ninth grade and part of the tenth, he managed to transport her to high school and back without doing anything worse than filling her ear with some of the raunchiest stories you could ever imagine. Some of these stories actually got her very aroused, but she concealed this state of her emotions from Raymond.

  She enjoyed feeling grown up. Her sisters were gone; Barbara had fled to California with a traveling salesman; Mandy had married a boy from Parthenon named Vaughn Twichell and had moved with him to Little Rock. Latha had the bed all to herself, although occasionally in her dreams or even her conscious fantasies, Every joined her there. One time she felt so lustful that she allowed the image of Raymond to join her, but for all his talk of sex, in her fantasies he didn’t seem to be very good at it, and he got over the mountain long before she could.

  There are only so many raunchy stories in circulation, and eventually Raymond ran out of them. He tried to make up some, but he wasn’t very inventive or didn’t know how to tell a story he hadn’t heard before, so he just stopped telling them. They rode to and from Jasper in silence, or made some commentary on the weather, the school, the teachers, their classmates. Latha was very popular among her fellow students, and so was Raymond, despite his age. They were voted King and Queen of Hearts at the Valentine’s square dance, and were thus obliged to d
ance with each other, or, since square dances are communal, they served as each other’s partner, which he had neglected to do at that play-party. Everybody assumed they were sweethearts, although Raymond never lost a chance to flirt with any girl he chose, and in fact was rumored to have seduced several of them in the cloakroom, the janitor’s closet, and even an empty classroom, although never the same girl twice, which fact fed the belief that he and Latha were going steady. Latha had good reason to believe the rumors about him, because Raymond always gave a detailed account of his trysts to her, and she knew him well enough by now to be able to tell when he was just making something up. “Wow, I’m a-tellin ye,” he might say, “Clarabelle and me did it on the grass out behind the ball field, and I screwed that ole gal so hard she farted holes in the ground!”