“Howdy, Miss M—” He started to address her formally but then asked, politely, as if making an important request, “What can I call ye?” And then suggested an answer: “Do you want me to call ye Viridis?” She nodded. “I’ve been lookin for ye,” he said in a way that told her he had been counting the hours waiting for her.
“I’ve done a bit of traveling,” she said. “I’ve been to your Stay More and back. It took me a while.”
“On a horse?” he asked, grinning.
She nodded. “A mare, actually. Named Rosabone.”
“You rode Rosabone all the way to Stay More?”
“No, we took the train as far as Clarksville.”
“‘We’? Oh, you mean you and the mare?”
She nodded. He laughed. She declared, “Stay More is a beautiful place. A fabulous place.”
“This time of year?” He raised his heavy eyebrows, which were the only good hair he had remaining on his head. “Swains Creek must be froze.”
“Banty Creek is iced over, but not Swains Creek.”
“You went up Banty Creek?”
“I went everywhere.”
“Even my—even the Chism place?”
“Especially the Chism place.”
“You met my momma?”
“I had some long talks with your mother.”
“And Paw—how is he?”
“Middlin to fair.”
Nail chuckled. “‘Middlin to fair,’ huh? Who taught ye that?”
“Who does it sound like?”
“Him. Paw. You said it almost like he was standin right here.”
“He wishes he were. He said to tell you, ‘Boy, don’t ye never fergit, yo’re a Chism, and Chisms don’t never quit.’”
Nail shook his head in wonder. “It’s almost like you brought his voice with ye.”
“I brought all their voices with me.” She looked him closely in the eye, as near as the screen would permit. “And the voices of the trees too. In your front yard, looking out over the whole valley and the next valley over, there are two huge trees. Sockdolager old trees!”
“‘Sockdolager…’” Nail chuckled. “You didn’t hear that one from Paw.”
“No, from Willis Ingledew. But he wasn’t talking about your trees. Nobody called your trees that, except the trees themselves.”
Nail squinted his eyes intently. “They spoke to ye?”
She smiled. “In a manner of speaking. They don’t use our language, of course. And you and I are both crazier than coots.”
Laughing, he said, “Those trees are a walnut and a maple. I used to climb that walnut plumb nearly to the top, and I could see all the way to Jasper. And that old maple, the peckerwoods would ring it and make the awfulest racket while I was tryin to build play roads around the roots.”
She saw him again at the age of nine, alone, building his play roads beneath the maple. Alone because, Nancy Nail Chism had told her, the nearest kid his own age, E.H. Ingledew (always called E.H.), now the village dentist (who’d sat Viridis in his chair while he answered her questions because that was the only way he could talk to anyone), lived a long way off and was from a better family that didn’t “mix” with the Chisms.
A precious one of their fifteen allotted minutes escaped while Nail reminisced about the trees in his yard and Viridis again pictured him there. She was hoping he wouldn’t ask about his brother Waymon so that she wouldn’t have to tell him.
“Well,” he said at length, “didje git to talk to Latha Bourne?”
“Oh, yes!” Viridis exclaimed. “You told me once there were only three people who really know you are innocent: yourself, your mother, and Dorinda. That’s a very conservative estimate. Everyone in Stay More believes you are innocent, but Latha Bourne knows you are innocent. She’s a remarkable young lady. She is, as you told me, honest and smart and kind. I’m very fond of Latha Bourne.”
Nail shook his head. “What I could never figure is how come a nice girl like her become chummy with Rindy Whitter in the first place.”
She looked at him. She did not know how to say this, but she tried: “Dorinda Whitter is not totally bad. She’s not very intelligent, and what little sense she has is corrupted by her greed and selfishness, but she is not hopelessly malignant.”
“Oh, so you talked to her too?”
“I talked to everyone, Nail.”
“Everyone? That’s an awful lot of people.”
Their allotted time was running out. She opened her purse and took out the bundle of pages and peeled off the top sheet. “Let me read the beginning,” she said, and read: “‘To His Excellency Governor George W. Hays. We, the undersigned, residents and voters of Newton County, Arkansas, do hereby solemnly petition Your Excellency to consider the sentence of death under which our friend, Nail Chism, has been placed, wrongly we feel. We each and severally believe him to be innocent of the crime of which he was charged, and we humbly entreat Your Excellency to wield your authority to pardon him, or at least to commute the sentence of death.’”
Viridis held up the many sheets so that Nail could see the signatures. “There are 2,806 names here, in all,” she said. “Of course, many of them are just X’s, but in each case where the person was unable to write his or her name, I have filled it in beside the X. See?” She held up page after page for his scrutiny.
Nail peered at the sheets as closely as the screen would allow. “I declare, you’ve got everbody on there!” he exclaimed. And she did, and she knew it: people from all over Newton County but particularly the Stay Morons: all the Ingledews, Duckworths, Plowrights, Swains, Coes, Chisms, Bullens, Bournes, Murrisons, Cluleys, Dinsmores, Kimbers…yes, even the Whitters. Of course all of the names were male; a voteless woman’s name carried no weight with the governor. But there was one female name, and Viridis held her forefinger on it and said, “Now, here’s an X, but beside it there’s an attempt to spell out the name. Can you make out the letters?”
Nail slowly read and spoke each letter. “D,” he said. “O, and R, and I, and N, and—” He stopped, he looked up at Viridis, and his eyes were questioning so that what he said next sounded almost like a question but was actually a statement, just whispered: “It’s her.”
Viridis nodded. “Now, listen, Nail. Our time is almost up. I’m going to go home and try to write you some of the things that I don’t have time to tell you, and I’ll get Farrell Cobb to bring you the letter within a week. There’s so much I have to tell you about my trip to Stay More. I have to tell you about Judge Jerram…”
“Don’t tell me you met him too?”
“I had some very unpleasant encounters with Judge Sull Jerram. I’ll tell you about it. I’ve got so many things to tell you, but for now our time has run out.”
“Hell,” Nail said. “They ought to give us thirty minutes, on account of I didn’t get any visit time during January. I’m owed twice as much, aren’t I?”
“You certainly are,” she said. “But I can have only half of it. I’ve talked to Mr. Fancher—the one you call Short Leg—and he says that you can have another fifteen minutes for the time you didn’t have in January.” She smiled. “But not with me. There’s someone else here waiting to see you. I’ve got to go. I’ll be your first visitor for March. Good-bye for now, Nail. Take care, and promise me you’ll try to eat whatever they give you.”
“Who—? What—? Hey!” Nail protested, but before he could say anything else, she got herself out of there. In the anteroom she gave a sigh both of relief at getting out on time, in fifteen minutes, and of disappointment at not having been able to talk to him more.
Then she turned to the bench where the girl was sitting. “All right, Dorinda,” she said. “You be a good girl and get yourself on in there.”
Off
Off she had gone to Stay More, in the middle of the winter, and we had met. To me, at first, she had been simply that stranger-lady everybody was already talking about so much that the gossip reached me before she did. The first I had ever hea
rd of Viridis Monday was Bertha Kimber telling my mother, “Ay-law, Fannie, they’s a womarn a-stayin down to the Ingledew big house and done rid her mare plumb from Little Rock!”
But Viridis did not ride the mare all the way from Little Rock, which would have taken forever even if she and the horse both had not frozen to death. No, she put the mare on a train, and they rode the train for most of the way, and she rode the mare only the last sixty miles or so of the trip…but that is getting ahead of the story.
Tom Fletcher did not want her to do it. The Gazette’s managing editor tried not just once but on several occasions through December and January to dissuade Viridis from making the trip. When it became obvious to him that she would not be discouraged by the weather reports, deterred by horrendous descriptions of the Newton County terrain and roads (or lack of them), daunted by the obvious futility of the mission (Fletcher himself, he later confessed to her, had done some checking and sent a couple of seasoned statehouse reporters out to gather the facts and determine that Nail Chism was guilty, and that unless and until Arkansas joined the other states that had abolished the death penalty for rape there was not going to be any way to get the sentence commuted), diverted by a more interesting assignment (he offered to let her cover the legislature’s debate on whether or not Arkansas would go totally dry)—only then did he attempt to kid her out of the “mission” by making it seem an adventure into terra incognita: She would need, he said, to hire some guides, and an interpreter, and a band of bearers. She would need an English-Ozarkian dictionary and phrasebook. She would have to get herself a raccoon coat and a coonskin cap and carry an elephant gun. As a joke, Tom Fletcher had the boys down in the pressroom print up a mock article, “Elephants in the Ozarks,” which he left on her desk.
When it became clear to him (and he was a wise man as well as a practical joker) that nothing would stop her from going to Stay More, he called her to his desk and sat her down and apologized for having belittled her plan, and announced that he had given it some serious thought and decided not only to let her go but to take her himself. If she could just wait until early March when it warmed up a bit, he could get a few days off and borrow a Columbia touring car, which would get the two of them up there and back to Little Rock in no time. He had checked the route as far as Jasper, where, he knew, there was a fair hotel called the Buckhorn they could put up at. Separate rooms, of course, he added, and winked.
Viridis liked Tom Fletcher quite a lot, but she did not like the idea of waiting until March, or of having her own investigation paced and directed by her boss. If it was all the same to him, she said, she’d appreciate having her total independence.
When the time of her furlough from the Gazette approached, he called her to his desk again and laid out before her the timetables of the railroads. She could take the St. Louis & Iron Mountain train westbound as far as Van Buren, transfer there (after a night’s layover at a fair hotel) to a St. Louis & San Francisco (or “Frisco”) train, which would take her north to Fayetteville, or, rather, to Fayette Junction, the terminus of the Frisco’s spur eastward to Pettigrew, where, after a night (at a fair hotel), she could hire a driver and buggy to take her over the mountains a day’s ride (or a day and a half, at most) to Stay More. She ought to be able to make the whole trip, there and back, in a week.
Viridis thanked Tom Fletcher for his concern and his help, but she had already planned her itinerary, and her modus operandi. She intended to put her own Arabian mare aboard the Iron Mountain train, which she would ride only as far as Clarksville, then alight there and ride the mare northward for two days until she reached Stay More.
Tom Fletcher consulted his maps and tables. “But there aren’t any fair hotels in that wilderness,” he said. “And you’re not going to camp out under the stars in this weather.”
She smiled and told him she would manage, without any camping out. She was not taking a bedroll or any equipment other than a spare blanket for extra warmth if she needed it, and a heavy horse blanket for her mare. Her saddlebags—and she was using an American western saddle, not an English riding-saddle—would contain only her changes of clothing, one dress neatly folded, spare jodhpurs, extra shoes, her writing-pads, pencils, and her sketchbooks and drawing-supplies.
“Aren’t you going to be armed?” Tom Fletcher asked, and when she showed him the derringer she kept in her purse, he laughed and said it might deter human molesters but wouldn’t work against an elephant…or, okay, there weren’t any of those, but there were real wolves, bears, and panthers. He persuaded her to accept the loan of a Smith & Wesson revolver, which, he said, would not kill wolves, bears, or panthers but would certainly intimidate them. Since, he warned, facility in the use of a revolver is not easily acquired, he offered to give her some lessons. “Let’s climb into my Ford and drive over to Big Rock and shoot bottles.”
That was their first “date.” Emboldened, a day later he asked her to dinner. Tom Fletcher was a thirty-two-year-old bachelor possessed of a strong, handsome face despite overly bulging eyeballs, and, as we’ve noted, wisdom and humor. He was a first cousin of a Little Rock literary light, then living in England, named John Gould Fletcher, who would later acquire a reputation as one of the Imagist poets. At dinner, in the restaurant of the Capital Hotel, Tom made one last effort to talk Viridis out of her “quixotical quest.” Failing, he declared, “I’m awfully fond of you, Very, and if anything happened to you, I’d kill myself.”
Nothing, really, happened to her, except for a couple of scares. She had the time of her life. Even her horse seemed enlivened by the adventure. The mare, which she’d owned now for nearly a year, was a grandniece of Géricault, her jumping horse of old, and although Viridis did not jump her a lot, she was capable of it. Viridis had named her after a famous French woman painter of the last century who had specialized in horses, Rosa Bonheur, but Viridis had shortened this to the playful “Rosabone,” to which the mare responded. Before her sudden interest in Nail Chism, Viridis spoke only to Rosabone. Tom Fletcher pointed out to her the similarity between “Rosabone” and “Rocinante,” the wretched horse of Don Quixote.
Rosabone did not balk at being loaded onto a cattle car of the Iron Mountain train; it was an enclosed car, albeit an unheated one, and Viridis draped her liberally with a thick horse blanket. Then Viridis settled down in the passenger car to watch as the train maneuvered the Baring Cross bridge over the Arkansas River into Argenta. The stations they passed, or at which they briefly took on mail or an occasional passenger, on the way to Conway—Amboy, Marché, Wilder, Palarm, Mayflower, Gold Creek—were the same little jerkwaters and whistlestops she’d passed through twice every weekend during her semester’s attendance at Conway Central College and Conservatory of Fine Arts, and the sight of those familiar, almost identical clusters of wooden false-fronted stores and the little railroad depots brought back to her the impoverishment of her collegiate experience. She had come so far since those days, and yet, going back again now, especially as the train pulled in and stopped for a while at Conway, within sight of her old campus, she felt as if she were recapturing something she had lost, or getting another opportunity to do something she had neglected, the first time around.
Conway had really been the limit of her penetration into the Arkansas hinterland, and now, as the train left it and gathered speed to the northwest and the uplands, which she could see already in the distance, she felt that she was going to explore some recesses of her native state that she had not known before. The train followed a generally westward course paralleling the Arkansas River and passing through towns, some of good size, that seemed to have been created by the railroad and had avenues flanking the tracks, and new business buildings: drugstores, hardware stores, furniture stores, even a small theater or two. Passing through Atkins, she had a clear view of the new brick façade of the J.M. Maus Company, a two-story block that was more like a Little Rock department store than a backwoods general emporium. To one side of the store the wagons of trappers were u
nloading their contents of furs, fox and possum skins, to be traded for merchandise. The people, especially the men, did not exhibit any pretense or cultivation in their appearance; they were an anticipation of the roughcast yeomen she would encounter in Newton County.
She rode into the sunset at Russellville, and thereafter the little stations the train passed were illuminated only by single lights over their depot signs: Ouita, Mill Creek, London, Scotia, Piney. There are so many little towns out there, she reflected, and so many little lives, all of them strange to me. There are two aspects of travel by rail that she was acutely aware of: one is the sense of “out-thereness,” of all that lies on both sides of this passage; and the other is of this passage itself, this channel, this extended tube through which one is passed, with a beginning and an end.
She broke free in the middle. Halfway between Conway and Fort Smith, at Clarksville, she left this tube and entered the out-there. After a night at the St. James Hotel, where she sheltered Rosabone in the hotel’s horse-barn, and after a good early breakfast of oats for the mare and oatmeal for the rider, they struck out northward along a winding road pointing toward the mountains. The morning was very cold but clear, the air bracing. Viridis let Rosabone set her own pace, with an occasional run on the downslope of hills. Horse and rider had not gone more than a few miles, as far as Ludwig, before they encountered the first signs of astonishment in bystanders or other riders. The other riders were all male, and they had to look twice to see that she was not, and then, if there were two or more of them, they had to do a lot of talking among themselves about this exceptional circumstance of a lone woman in pants riding astraddle. Yard dogs who ordinarily would have chased a passing horse for a while ran out and took one sniff and gave her a tilted-head look. Women stood with their hands on their hips and their mouths open.
But there were not a lot of people. North of Harmony, which she reached at midmorning (and paused to admire the quaint stone church there), the fields gave way mostly to forests, with only an occasional farm before she reached the village of Ozone. How did she know, and later tell me, these names of towns—Ludwig, Harmony, Ozone? (There were no road signs in those days.) Because, in every village she passed, she stopped to ask someone, just to be sure she was on the right road to Newton County. In the case of the last place, she said, “Ozone? That’s an unusual name. Is it because of the quality of the air?” The air there, as elsewhere in the Ozarks, was sweet and clear and heady. “Couldn’t rightly tell ye, ma’am,” the man said. “Hit’s jist been called thet, fur back as I can recall.”
The Choiring Of The Trees Page 16