The Choiring Of The Trees

by Donald Harington

  Seth Chism took a turn for the worse. Nowadays, if he were still living, he’d be rushed in an ambulance to the hospital and put in the ICU, but back then nobody’d ever heard of an ambulance, and although there was a kind of hospital up at Harrison, thirty miles off, it was an all-day ride on a road so bad it’d kill you if your disease didn’t, and once you got there the bed wasn’t any different from what you had at home. So Seth Chism lay dying in his own bed, and all Doc Swain could do was send Waymon Chism to Harrison to bring back a prescription for some heart medicine, which Doc didn’t carry and which couldn’t be had in what passed for a drugstore in Jasper.

  Waymon hired out one of Willis Ingledew’s best horses to ride to Harrison for the heart medicine. He hoped to leave early enough and ride hard enough to get back in the same day, and he was already gone when I was out in my garden patch before sunrise. I had my bath, and on my way back from my little waterfall I spotted a fat red squirrel sitting on a tree limb and hit it with the first shot from my .22, and Rouser retrieved it for me, and I promised him the bones from the stew pot that night. I noticed the mullein named Nail still bent down to the ground, and I stood and talked to it for a while, but it wouldn’t even twitch. Then as I was returning to the house, not yet close enough to the house to have a good view of the road, I saw Viridis and Rosabone go by; I could tell it was them by the mare’s gait. They were just trotting along, not running.

  They were scarcely out of sight when here came another rider. I figured at first it was just one of those deputies. But I’d seen both of them, and their horses, often enough to know, even from a distance, that this wasn’t either one. The trouble was, I was close enough to the house, and running now, trying to get closer, to tell it wasn’t a deputy, but not close enough to recognize the man.

  When I reached the house, I threw my squirrel into a pot and covered it, then kept on running after them with Rouser at my heels, and I had to shush him when he commenced barking because he sensed my excitement. It was uphill, and I couldn’t run fast enough to keep up with them. I realized I was still carrying the .22 in one hand, and I was tempted to leave it so I could run faster, but something made me hang on to it.

  I didn’t come within sight of Viridis or the horseman until, much later, I reached Nail Chism’s sheep pastures and could just make out the figures of Viridis and Rosabone disappearing into the far corner where the upper pasture dissolved into the woodland trail. I knew that Viridis always waited there, as she had the first time we’d gone there together, to make sure that she wasn’t being followed. But now the man who was following her had disappeared, or was hiding, and I didn’t see him again until a few moments after Viridis disappeared into the woods; then he and his horse came crashing out of the trees at the south end of the sheep pasture and took out across the pasture at a gallop, headed toward that far corner where she had gone.

  For a wonderful long moment, I thought it was Nail. I wondered where he had obtained such a big fine horse, but he could have stolen one somewhere along his travels from Little Rock to Stay More. And yet I knew that my mullein stalk wouldn’t have lied to me. It could not be Nail. I was reminded of that time, a June ago, over a year, when I had been at the playhouse with Rindy and had seen the man far down below in the field, the man who, everybody would try to get me to say, was Nail, but was not Nail, was the man who had actually assaulted Rindy: was Sull. Was this Sull too? He was too far away for me to tell, but I was determined to find out, and I paused breathless and heaving for just a minute before resuming my climb up through that weed-infested sheep pasture toward the obscure entrance to the woods where now the man and his horse had disappeared in pursuit of Viridis.

  By the time Rouser and I reached the entrance to the woods ourselves, we were far behind them. If the man was following Viridis, he had surely caught up with her by now. If he was only trying to find out the location of the hideaway that she visited daily, he had found it by now. If he intended to do her some harm, to rape her, even to kill her, he was well on his way to doing it. Once I’d reached the woodland trail and it leveled off a bit and I could run faster, I began running again, and as I plunged deeper into the woods I ran until I thought my heart would burst or my lungs explode.

  I tripped on a root and flew: I was airborne, and my rifle left my hand and flew farther than I did before I slammed down to the ground and got all the wind knocked out of me and my dress ripped up and dirtied and could only lie there whimpering for a while until the air came back into my lungs and I could bend and kneel and get my feet up under me again and then, painfully, stand. I hadn’t broken anything. I found my rifle off in a pile of old leaves, nearly hidden. I ran on, watching my feet.

  I still had a ways to go to reach the glen of the waterfall, when I saw the horse. It was the man’s horse, but he was not in the saddle, and the horse was just standing there, not tied. Suddenly I stopped, thinking the man was bound to be near. My heart was already pounding in my ears from my run; now it was pounding harder from fright. I raised my rifle and held it ready to use. I crooked my finger around the trigger. But I did not squeeze it. That I am sure of.

  And I am almost sure that the rifle wasn’t loaded. It was a cheap single-shot .22, and I don’t recall putting another bullet in it after I killed that squirrel. But I would ask myself, in the hours and days following: was it at all possible that in my excitement and distraction I did reload, and then when I tripped on that root and the rifle left my hand, it hit the ground and fired itself? Could that be? I had slammed into the ground so hard that I might not have heard the rifle go off. Could it, by sheer chance, have landed in that pile of leaves pointed so that its bullet, accidentally discharging, would find its way through hundreds of yards of thick woods and hit a man in the back of the head?

  Because he had been hit in the back of the head. It was, Doc Swain declared later, a .22 bullet. It had been fired not from the Smith & Wesson revolver that Viridis possessed but from a .22 rifle such as the one I carried.

  There have been a few times in my long life when I was not at all certain just what was happening to me, or what I was doing, but unless, as I conjectured, my rifle shot itself off after flying out of my hands, that bullet was not fired from my rifle. I know this!

  And yet there he was. I found him near his horse, lying face up, already dead, I knew. I wouldn’t touch him, I just looked at him.

  And then I spoke to his dead body the kind of thing a murderess might have said: “Well, Sull Jerram, you won’t never hurt another soul.”

  On

  You didn’t do that.”

  She had not ridden Rosabone all the way into the glen of the waterfall, and thus she did not know if Nail had finally come nor if the contents of the cavern had been touched. When she heard the rifle fire, she pulled back on Rosabone’s reins and waited, listening, for a long scary moment, then turned back in the direction of the sound without even knowing who had fired the rifle. She had not ridden very far back when she came upon the strange scene: a dead man lying on the ground beside his horse, a girl standing over him with a rifle. “You didn’t do that,” she said to the girl.

  “Uh-uh, I sure didn’t,” I said to her.

  Viridis jumped down from Rosabone’s back and peered closely at the face of Sull Jerram, the eyes squeezed tightly shut as if in pain, the mouth clenched, an ugly face making its last grimace. She had to turn the face to one side, gingerly, to find the bullet hole: just behind the right ear at the base of the skull. I don’t see how a .22 bullet fired from such a distance could have penetrated the head of such a thick-skulled man. But it did. Except that at that moment I didn’t know it was a .22 bullet. And he was as dead as you are allowed to get in this world. Viridis put her ear against his chest and listened for a heartbeat but shook her head. She felt for his pulse but found none. “He’s dead,” she told me, as if I needed to be told.

  “He was following you,” I told her, as if I knew something she didn’t.

  “And you were following him?
” she asked, and then pointed to my rifle. “Could I see that?”

  I handed her my rifle. She examined it, sniffed it, looked into the chamber, where a spent cartridge lay. “I killed a squirrel,” I said.

  She gave me a strange look I hadn’t had from her before. “Where’s the squirrel?” she asked.

  I attempted to explain. The squirrel, I said, had been killed some time before and was now in a pot on the porch of my house. I hadn’t reloaded the gun but was just carrying it, I guess with that spent cartridge of the bullet that had killed the squirrel still in it. I sure hadn’t shot Sull Jerram with it. Much as I would have liked to. Heck, I didn’t even know it was him until I found him dead. I swear. “Don’t you believe me?” I begged.

  “I want to believe you,” she said, and she commenced looking around at the woods on all sides of us. “But who else could it have been? Unless…” She stared so fixedly off into the woods that I thought she must be looking right at him, and I looked in that direction too but didn’t see anyone. “NAIL?” she shouted.

  I really hoped he was there. Despite my mullein, which never lies, I hoped he was there, so that he could take the credit, or the blame, for shooting Sull Jerram, and so that we could all live happily ever after. It was time for him to come. But he had not come. The woods were deep-green and silent.

  At length she said, “Well, I guess we’ve got to tell somebody about this.”

  I offered, “I could run home and fetch Paw’s shovel, and we could just bury him right here and nobody would know about it.”

  She gave me that strange look again. “And bury his horse too? No, they’d find him, sooner or later. We’d better report this. Who should I report it to?”

  We discussed it and decided that the best person to tell would be Doc Swain. But while we went off to fetch him, we couldn’t just leave the body and the horse to the mercy of wolves or buzzards. One of us would have to stand guard until Doc Swain got here.

  “Can you ride Rosabone?” she asked.

  “Sure, but she knows you better. You go, and I’ll stay with the body.”

  “You won’t be scared?”

  “A little, but I can manage.”

  “All right, we’ll be back as soon as we can.” She climbed up on Rosabone and turned her to go. “You’ll be here when I get back?” she asked uncertainly.

  I nodded, and she was gone. It wouldn’t take her half an hour to run down to the village, and if Doc Swain wasn’t too busy he’d saddle his horse and be back with her within an hour. But it was going to be the longest hour I ever spent. My first thought, when I was alone with the corpse of Sull Jerram, was that whoever had killed him might still be lurking in the woods and take a shot at me. My second thought, as the all-overs began to creep up on me, was that maybe I was the killer and had no one to fear except myself.

  Rouser kept me good company and didn’t wander off.

  I had never seen a dead body before, much less been all alone with one.

  It was worse than being alone in a cemetery at night: at least the bodies there are all covered up so you can’t see them.

  I thought of reloading my rifle, for protection, but decided I’d better just leave it the way it was.

  I tried what Viridis had tried: I called out, “NAIL?” and heard my voice echoing up in the glen but didn’t get any reply.

  If I hadn’t killed Sull, and Nail wasn’t anywhere around, who had done it? Waymon Chism? But Waymon was gone to Harrison, or was supposed to be.

  I began to worry about something else, something important: Doc Swain would be discovering these woods, this intended hiding-place, and if he brought the law up here, they might even go farther up the holler and discover the waterfall and the caverns. What good would it be as a hiding-place if everybody knew about it?

  Or maybe it wouldn’t ever be needed as a hiding-place. Maybe Nail wasn’t ever going to come.

  When that long hour had dragged out to its close, and the morning was long gone, Viridis returned. There were two other men on horses with her, neither of them a sheriff’s deputy. One was Doc Swain. The other was his father, old Alonzo Swain, who, I realized, was still our justice of the peace, as he had been for many years. The older Doc Swain, who had given up his practice to his son Colvin a few years after the son got his medical degree from a St. Louis mail-order college, was also still deputy coroner for Newton County. So he could serve several functions here.

  The younger Doc Swain helped the older down from his horse. Both men first said politely to me, “Howdy, Latha,” and then began to examine the corpse. Doc had a notebook with him, and he made some notes and drew a couple of diagrams showing where the body lay in relation to the trees around it, and then he took a sharp stick and traced an outline of Sull’s body in the dirt, and then he and his father lifted the corpse and slung it over the saddle of Sull’s horse like a sack of meal.

  We Bournes had never been able to afford Doc Alonzo Swain, and Doc Plowright had always been our doctor, so the older man didn’t know me too well. Now he looked at me, and the first thing he asked was “How old air ye, gal?”

  Of course he hadn’t delivered me. A midwife had done it, without even any help from Doc Plowright. “Goin on fourteen,” I said.

  “Do ye want me to question ye out yere in these woods, or do ye wanter go have ye a bite of dinner and then come to my office?” He asked this kindly-like, and I appreciated it.

  “I don’t keer,” I said. “Might as well do it here.”

  “I’ve done et my dinner anyhow,” he announced, “and so’s Colvin. But you ladies mought be hungry.”

  I was flattered he called me a lady, without any of the condescension that one hears in “little lady.” “I can hold off eatin till you’re done with your questions,” I declared.

  “All righty,” he said, and motioned for us to sit together on a fallen tree trunk. “Well, number one. Would ye have any reason fer killin this man?”

  I laughed. “Do you know anybody who wouldn’t?”

  “Please jist answer the questions, Miss,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “I had all kinds of reasons for killin him. He raped my best friend. He sent a good man to prison and nearly to the ’letric chair. He was follerin this lady, Viridis, and Lord knows what he aimed to do to her. Sure, I had all of kinds of reasons for killin him, and I wish I had. I really wish it was me who had done it. But it wasn’t. I didn’t.”

  “Who else do you think it might’ve been?” old Doc Swain asked.

  “It could’ve been any man…or woman…or child old enough to hold a rifle. Anybody who knew Sull Jerram and knew what he was like and what he done.” I pointed at the old doctor’s chest. “It could’ve just as well been you.”

  That didn’t fluster him. He chuckled and glanced at his son and said, “She’s shore right about that. Or you, either one, Colvin.”

  “Don’t I know it?” the young Doc Swain admitted. “But ask her whar she got this yere Winchester.” He held up the .22.

  “Well?” the older man said to me.

  “I bought it from Sears, Roebuck through the mail,” I declared truthfully, and added, “Four dollars and twenty-five cents, plus postage.”

  “Whar’d you git the money?” he asked. The question contained an insinuation I didn’t like: the Bournes were too poor to afford Doc Swain, too poor to buy their least daughter a shootin-arn.

  “Same place you got yours,” I said. “Honest toil.”

  The old doctor grinned, and for a moment I thought he would ask me what kind of honest toil, and I was prepared to answer that one too, but he took up a different line of questioning: “You said that Sull…the deceased…was a-follerin this lady. How do you know he was a-follerin her?”

  So I started at the beginning: how I had seen a man on a horse riding after Viridis, and how I had followed them, and everything that had happened, including me tripping and falling and dropping my rifle. “I’ll show you where it was,” I offered, and I led them back throug
h the woods to the place where I had been running, and I pointed out the root that had snagged my foot and sent me flying, and I showed them the pile of old leaves where my gun had landed. The younger Doc Swain measured off the distance from this spot to the spot where Sull Jerram had lain dead.

  “Hmm,” said old Doc Swain. “Still and all, you’ve got a empty cartridge in that rifle.”

  So I told them about the squirrel too.

  “What did ye do with the squirrel?” old Doc Swain asked.

  “I put it in a pot on the porch,” I pronounced, unmindful of the alliteration.

  “I reckon we better go see if it’s still there,” declared the old doctor/j.p./coroner.

  We left those woods. As far as I know, the two doctors Swain never did go any farther back up into the glen where the waterfall was. They never did learn of the hiding-place and trysting-place that was still waiting for Viridis and Nail to use, if he ever showed up. They questioned Viridis about what she had been doing, where she was going when Sull was following her, and they checked to make sure that her Smith & Wesson was a .38, not a .22, and for that matter hadn’t been fired anytime recently. But she never said anything about her destination at the waterfall, which was beyond sight and earshot of the place where Sull Jerram fell dead.

  And that old squirrel was still in that old pot, where I had left it. I figured it sure had been lucky that Rouser had gone with me; if I’d left him at home, he’d have worried the lid off that pot and got that squirrel. But it was in the pot. The younger Doc Swain took his pocketknife and dug out the bullet and matched it up with that spent cartridge in my rifle, and he looked his father in the eye and nodded. The old doctor said, “Wal, Latha, it looks like you aint a suspect no more. I don’t reckon we even need to tell the sherf that you ever was a suspect. We’ll jist say you was the one who discovered the body, and the sherf might want to ask you some questions too, but you jist tell the truth, ’cept you don’t have to say nothing about no rifle you was carryin. No need to do that.”