The Choiring Of The Trees

by Donald Harington

  “I do believe you’ve got the swamp fever,” she told him, and then, after the chill had ceased and the burning fever had started, she was confirmed in her suspicion: “No doubt about it, you’ve got yoreself the bad malaria.” She became almost happy at the prospect of keeping him another day, or longer, tending his fever with towels soaked in cold well water, and later, when he began to sweat profusely, lovingly blotting it all up with rags. She sent the girl, Betsy, down the trail to the neighbors’ to see if she could borrow a little bit of whiskey, and the girl returned carrying the glass jar as if it held frankincense or myrrh.

  Mary Jane put something into the whiskey; she refused to tell Nail what, but he, who could judge whiskey well enough to smell the feet of the boys who’d plowed the corn, knew the whiskey was adulterated. “I aint sposed to tell ye,” she insisted, “or it would take the spell off.” Whatever she put in (and I can only guess it probably was three drops of the blood of a black cat; Nail had observed a number of cats around the place) helped, although it tasted so awful he nearly gagged on it. He could not eat the fine dinner, or the leftovers at supper, but she forced him to drink some boneset tea, which is also very good for malaria, and to have another dose of the whiskey-with-cat’s-blood every two hours, or as often as he could stand it. And at bedtime she crawled in beside him. “Do what ye want,” she told him, but he had no strength to do anything, although he appreciated her closeness and softness and willingness.

  Early the next morning, while she still slept, he awoke to find that enough of his strength had returned that he could take her if he wanted, but he had made his choice: whatever strength he had, he would use for the hike. He was fully dressed and ready to go before she woke up, blinking at the sight of him in her late husband’s clothes in the pale light of dawn, and he protested that he didn’t need any breakfast, but she begged him to stay and have a big plate of bacon and eggs and biscuits and jam, and the first real coffee he’d had in nearly a year.

  And while he was pausing to eat before departure, the two children appeared and watched him eat, and Betsy asked him, “Don’t ye wanter be our daddy?”

  He could not finish eating. “I don’t know how,” he said. “I aint got any experience in that line.”

  “You’re a fool,” the woman said to him. “You don’t know a good thang when it’s lookin ye right squar in the face.”

  “I’m a fool, I reckon,” he admitted.

  “Have you got a woman waitin fer ye?” she asked.

  “I shorely hope so,” he said, and thanked her for everything and several times protested her insistence that he stay.

  When it became apparent that she could not persuade him to stay, she gave him one more thing of her late husband’s: a .22 rifle and a box of bullets for it. Nail had declined, but the woman had displayed her late husband’s entire arsenal: two shotguns, three rifles, even a handgun. She had offered him his pick, and he had decided on the .22 as most convenient. He would not be needing the bone air anymore, would he? she asked. “Could ye leave it for Eddie, when he grows up? I druther he learnt to use it than ary arn.”

  Nail presented his bone air to Eddie. Eddie swapped him his dead father’s felt fedora for the coonskin cap.

  She walked him as far as the trail and pointed the direction toward Ben Hur.

  “I’m shore much obliged,” he said.

  “Obliged enough to kiss me?” she asked.

  And he took off the hat that had been her husband’s, and he kissed her on the mouth and put the hat back on and did not look back, knowing that she’d not be watching him disappear, because it’s real bad luck and even worse manners to watch somebody go out of sight.

  Well, he told himself later on the trail, he wouldn’t never forget where Raspberry was, and if things didn’t work out between him and Viridis, he’d know where to find Mary Jane. Then he smiled and said to himself, But things is bound to work out between me and Viridis.

  It was in 1880 that General Lewis (Lew) Wallace published a historical romance called Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which became one of the best-selling novels of all time, and popular even in the Ozarks, where somebody discovered it about 1895 and decided to name a community after it, or, rather, after its title character, a Roman-educated Jew who converts to Christianity and does good deeds. There was no post office of that name until about 1930, when the boundary between Pope and Newton counties was redrawn and Ben Hur became a part of Newton County. As late as 1963, Ben Hur was the last community in Arkansas to receive electricity, and even today the eastern approach to the town remains the last stretch of unpaved state highway in the Ozarks.

  When Nail Chism passed through Ben Hur, he did it openly and even waved at a few people he encountered. He could have been taken for a foot traveler on his way to Moore or Tarlton, which is exactly what he was, carrying the deerskin and bearskin folded up under one arm, not wearing them in the heat, and the .22 rifle in the crook of his other arm was no more or less than any traveler might have carried.

  He was determined to reach the Newton County line before nightfall, and, while there were no signs along the road indicating the county line, he seemed to know when he had reached his home county: his pace slackened, his step faltered, and he stopped, knowing he had reached the end of the day’s journey: just a little less than nine miles, which, in his weakened condition, had utterly exhausted him. For supper, he had only the fond recollection of his last supper at Mary Jane’s, and then he went to sleep on a pile of leaves beneath a rock shelter in a place called Hideout Hollow.

  The next day he awakened once again with severe chills and knew then, conclusively, that he had the “two-day ague,” the form of malaria that recurs every other day. This third attack of the sequence of chills, fever, and sweating did not have the help of the medicine Mary Jane had given him; once again he was immobilized all day, and again he had the hallucination, or delirium, that he had reached Stay More and found a rock shelter in the glen of the waterfall prepared for him by Viridis. But this time when she appeared to him, she berated him for having slept with Mary Jane and told him he might as well go on back to Raspberry. On the next “good” day, in between the recurrent sick days, his first waking thought was that he ought to turn back to Raspberry and just stay there, if not forever at least until he was wholly recovered from the malaria.

  But he went on. For the duration of his next good day, he made no attempt to keep hidden in the woods but walked on the cleared wagon trails that connected Ben Hur to Moore, and Moore to Tarlton, and Tarlton to Holt. I calculate that he covered another eleven miles or so along those wagon trails, stopping only once to pass the time of day with an inquisitive driver who was hauling a load of hay from his lower meadows to his barn and wanted to know who Nail was and where he was headed and what he thought of this terrible drought. Nail almost relished the chance to chat casually with a countryman, a fellow hillman, and he even told the man the truth: what his name was, where he had been, and where he was heading. “Shore, I’ve heared of ye,” the man acknowledged. “Matter of fact, I signed that thar petition to git ye off. Leastways I put my X on her.”

  As Nail politely declined (three or four times) the man’s invitation to stay the night, the man asked, “Wal, air ye fixin to shoot Jedge Jerram?”

  Nail laughed. “I’d shore lak to do it, but all I kin think about right now is gittin myself on up home.”

  “Don’t take the right fork yonder,” the man suggested. “That’d take ye down Big Creek towards Mount Judy. Cut back over yon mountain and ye’ll come down to Tarlton. Stay More aint but about twelve, thirteen mile past thar. But you’d best jist come go home with me and stay all night.”

  “I’m much obliged,” Nail said, and then, remembering his manners, counteroffered, “Why don’t ye jist go to Stay More with me?”

  “Better not, I reckon,” the man said, and let him go, but called out from a distance, “I was you, I’d shore slay Jedge Jerram.”

  For the next several miles Nail
thought about that. He had been bent, all these days, only upon reaching the hills of Stay More, making contact with his folks, and seeing Viridis without a screen or a table separating them. He had not given much thought to revenge upon Sull Jerram. He hoped he would never even have to encounter the man; if he did, he didn’t intend to start anything; if Sull started something, Nail would be obliged to finish it. Certainly, he hated Sull, but he had not spent much time thinking about murdering him.

  As that good day ended, somewhere short of Tarlton, Nail wished he had accepted the man’s offer to spend the night. He knew that the next day promised another attack of chills, fever, and sweats, and he’d have been better off at the man’s house; maybe the man had some quinine or something that Nail could have taken. But it was too late, he was miles past the man’s place, and he needed to find something for supper that would tide him over the bad day, and to find a sheltered place to spend it.

  His weakness, his fatigue, his sense of being so close to home that he could almost smell the air of Stay More overwhelmed him, made him giddy, staggered him. Late in the afternoon he found himself, he thought, in a sheep pasture! Real sheep, or at least tangible ones: he called to them, a flock of less than a dozen, “Sheep! sheep! sheepsheepsheep!” and they came to him, and he sank his fingers into their regrowing fleece, although they were skittish, smelling the bearskin he still carried. He inspected them carefully; whoever owned them did not know much about the care of sheep and was not feeding them right or keeping them happy. Nail could not see any near farmstead or signs of a trail leading to one, and if the owner of the sheep had a sheepdog, the dog was busy elsewhere. Nail decided to spend the night with the sheep, and he did. For his supper, he shot a squirrel with the .22 and roasted it over coals. The sheep watched him and sniffed the smoke of his campfire and made puzzled sheep’s-faces.

  When the chills seized him the next morning, he attempted to snuggle up against a ewe to keep warm, but she did not understand what he was doing and ran away from him. The bellwether, a castrated ram, led her and the other sheep off down the hill, away from Nail, who could not get up from the ground and follow them. He covered himself with his deerskin and his bearskin and shivered violently for what seemed longer than the usual hour. All day he watched for the sheep to return, but they did not, although he called them again when the sweats had cooled him enough to restore his ability to shout, and eventually he decided that the sheep were only part of his delirium.

  Did he get up from the ground and move on? Or was that just another part of his delirium? It seemed to him that he was walking, but he could not actually feel his feet touching the ground; it was more like the kind of wayfaring that we do in dreams, moving soundlessly and effortlessly from place to place, maybe even leaving the ground and flying. He must have flown over a few of those mountains. Journey within a journey: fish leaping for him on the still pools of a richly imagined creek that looked so much like the west fork of Shop Creek near the village of Spunkwater, just over the mountain from home. Even the distant chimneys and school-house bell tower of Spunkwater, where he hadn’t been in longer than he could remember, he remembered still as looking like that, or created them to look that way: familiar and comfortable and welcoming. The village had been named by some early drought-stricken settler after the lifesaving rainwater that remains in the cavities of trees or stumps, from the Scottish “sponge-water.” The drinking of spunkwater is supposed to cure you of wanderlust or make you handsome, one or the other or both, just as the waters of Solgohachia give you marital success.

  If Nail actually stopped at Spunkwater for a sip of the leftover rainwater, then he was cured of his roaming and would never do it again, and was transformed back into a good-looking man. If he only imagined that he had reached Spunkwater, the last community before you approach Stay More from the east, then he was a beggar riding his wish and spurring it on beyond its endurance.

  He would never afterward have any clear memory of the…hours? days?…of the following long passage of time. His last reasonably clear memory had been of the sheep disappearing, and that sheep pasture had been miles and miles from home, and then of his feeble efforts to find a shelter for the duration of his day’s sickness, where he could lie still and pretend he was hiking through Spunkwater, and up the steep eastern slopes of Ledbetter Mountain above Butterchurn Holler, and down, down into the glen of the waterfall. If we are only going to imagine things, we may as well imagine them as we have known them.

  The waterfall seemed so very real that he could almost use the help of the last time he had visited it, not the help of my letter but his memory of the last visit, before the trouble had started, in June of the previous year, just a little over a year before, and nothing had changed much since then, except that maybe the volume of the falls, springfed though it was, did not seem quite so full. That time he had explored again the caverns beneath the ledges on both sides of the waterfall and inspected their meager contents, the bits of woven stuff, shards of pottery, bones. This time he staggered into the larger cavern expecting to find exactly what he found: a bed. That bed was the best creation of his fevered brain, the product of his most burning fancy.

  He fell into it, that pile of blankets, quilts, comforters, and pillows, topped, as he had known it would be, with fresh white sheets, but he forgot to grope around for the fresh white sheet of paper with her handwriting on it that would tell him there was a harmonica beneath the bedpile; nor did he think to grope for the harmonica and play it all night. Nor did he think to notice even if it was night or day. His eyes closed as soon as he hit the bedpile, and he spread his arms to embrace the bedpile, and his overworked imagination failed him and dropped him into a deep, deep slumber.

  I was on my way to my own little waterfall when I spotted the mullein stalk standing upright. Looking back, it is a wonder how I managed to keep on going to my destination. My first impulse was to fetch Viridis immediately with the news that the mullein stalk was up! But two things stopped me: First, I really needed that bath; it was an exceptionally hot morning, and I’d sweated more than a girl should, and I wasn’t about to go off to meet my hero with garden dirt on my face and dried sweat all down my sides. And second, I could just see myself hollering, “Viridis! Viridis! The mullein has risen!” and her saying, “The what?” and me trying to explain and even forgetting an important fact: you can’t tell anyone about the magic of the mullein, or it’s sure to spoil the magic. If I told Viridis, or anyone, that the mullein had announced the safe return of Nail Chism to Stay More, provided they didn’t think I was crazy or just a silly, superstitious girl, I might be embarrassed to discover that my act of telling had wiped out the act of his coming.

  So I did two things: I went on up the holler and calmly took my bath…well, maybe not calmly, but deliberately enough to make sure that I got thoroughly washed off from head to toe, and even washed my hair, which would mostly dry in the sunshine before I could get home and brush it. And then I went on up to the glen of the waterfall alone, or alone except for Rouser, whom I couldn’t persuade to sit or stay. I even paused at the house, before trying to persuade him to sit or stay, to change from my faded gingham dress into my better blue calico, and then to brush my hair as best I could to get most of the kinks out. I thought of maybe a little rouge but decided against it. I did powder my nose, although it would become unpowdered again by the time I got to the glen of the waterfall. I wanted to wear my good shoes, but it was a long hike, so I made up my mind to wear my ugly working-shoes and take them off before I got there.

  “Where you goin in that dress?” my mother yelled as I was sneaking out the front door. “This aint Sunday, you fool.”

  If she’d been more civil, I would have answered her. Instead, I kept on going, and told Rouser to sit, but he wouldn’t. I told him to stay, but he wouldn’t. I nearly took a stick to him.

  Finally I just tried to ignore him, and he followed me all the way up the mountain to Nail’s old sheep pastures, and across them to the fo
rest, and through the cool, dark forest to the bright glen of the waterfall. I kept telling myself that all I wanted to do was find out if my mullein had been lying to me. There are, after all, a few known instances when superstitions didn’t do a bit of good, they only made you feel better or they out and out refused to cooperate, for some perverse reason of their own. It was just possible that my mullein stalk had mistaken Nail for somebody else, or else was a botanical freak that couldn’t stop growing straight anyhow. If by some small chance the mullein stalk had lied, I would be the first one to know it, and the last and only one to know it, and then I was going to tromp the heck out of that mullein and start over with a fresh one. If, as I devoutly believed, my mullein stalk was being honest and trustworthy, I intended to summon Viridis immediately and tell her that by accident I’d discovered that Nail was back. Well, of course I’d have to say howdy to him before I ran back to the village. I couldn’t just sneak up and make sure it was him and then run like the dickens.

  These were the thoughts that were running through my head while I hiked as fast as my legs would carry me. But there was another thought too, and I’m not ashamed to admit it: I had a kind of proprietary interest in Nail Chism. From the moment the whole trouble had started, a year before, I’d scarcely gone a day without thinking about him. I wanted him to be okay. I wanted him to escape the prison, as he had done, and I wanted him to make it safely back home, and I wanted him to live happily ever after. Sure, I wanted him, period. But that was something else. I knew Viridis deserved him a thousand times more than I did, and I knew she was going to have him, and I knew they were going to live so happily ever after that it would be like a fairy tale, and I knew in my bones that ever after was about ready to begin. But for a little while, just a little while, he was mine.

  Yes, I took off my ugly shoes before reaching the glen of the waterfall and walked the last hundred yards barefoot and stopped where the water was still in a pool, away from the plunge of the falls, to look down into it and see my reflection: my face was red, not from any rouge, and both hands could not arrange my black hair the way I wanted it, but at least I had on my best dress, and a strand of artificial amber beads around my neck. I wasn’t beautiful like Viridis, but I wasn’t ordinary either.