The Choiring Of The Trees Part 1

The Choiring of the Trees.

Donald Harington

For Llewellyn Howland III.

Once a great editor; still a great friend.

The novelist wishes to thank Bob Razer, librarian, his perennial advocate among Arkansas readers, who once upon a time invited the novelist to serve as a judge for the essay contest of the Pulaski County Historical a.s.sociation, one entry to which was a biography of a courageous Arkansas woman who sought to rescue an Ozarks mountaineer condemned to the electric chair. The author of that entry (which alas did not win the contest despite the novelist's admiration for it) was Marcia Camp, who further a.s.sisted him by furnis.h.i.+ng the original ma.n.u.script of that Arkansas woman's memoirs, and by suggesting that he should convert the woman from a novelist, which she was, into an artist, which she is herein.

Some of the people in this work of fiction are as "real" as the places. The governor of Arkansas during 19131917 was George Was.h.i.+ngton Hays, who may actually have been as bad or as good as he seems to appear here, and he was replaced in 1917 by Charles Hillman Brough, who was better. The state penitentiary at Little Rock was a place called The Walls, and conditions there were just as terrible as the novelist has attempted to depict them here.

Steve Chism offered the novelist access to numerous materials that enabled him to stick close enough to the facts to give this story the semblance of life and truth. And copy editor Douglas Woodyard took the novelist's words and gave them syntax, style, and sense.

The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas, Annihilating all that's made.

To a green thought in a green shade.

-Andrew Marvell "The Garden," stanza 6.

Constable said that the superiority of the green he uses for his landscapes derives from the fact that it is composed of a mult.i.tude of different greens. What causes the lack of intensity and of life in verdure as it is painted by the common run of landscapists is that they ordinarily do it with a uniform tint. What he said about the green of the meadows can be applied to all the other shades.

-Eugene Delacroix Journals.

On.

At sundown, when they led him to the chair, Nail Chism began to understand the meaning of the name of his hometown, Stay More. Down through the years, citizens have theorized about the origin of the name, but Nail Chism had always taken it for granted: it was just a name, like you call a tree a pine: you don't wonder if the tree's name is a behest too, telling you to yearn or to long or something. But now it suddenly dawned on Nail that the name of the village of his birth and rearing might contain some kind of message, urging him not to go to the chair but to hang around awhile and see what the world was a-coming to.

How could he do that, in the last few yards of walking s.p.a.ce left to him? Now they were trying to budge open the rusty iron door that led into Old Sparky's room. The hinges needed grease, and the thing hadn't been opened since they had cooked that colored boy, Skip, on Halloween. Fat Gabe spoke: "Chism, lean your shoulder into that. That's the ticket, here she goes." The iron door creaked open. The guests had already come into Old Sparky's room from their designated door.

But there weren't twelve of them. Nail Chism stopped thinking about the meaning of the name Stay More just long enough to squint into the dark room and take a head count. There weren't but nine, including Fat Gabe and Short Leg, his guards, and Bobo, at the switch. The law said you were required to have twelve witnesses. Nail himself had been brought in to stand witness for Skip the colored boy, and before him for that mother-killer Clarence Smead, who sure enough had at least eleven other witnesses besides Nail.

Could this be a sign? Could it be that the presence of only nine witnesses indicated that it wouldn't happen, that Nail would stay more? Or maybe they just hadn't all arrived yet? Or maybe in the dark corners he'd missed one or two? Maybe they'd have to wait awhile for the others to show up, and that would be long enough for Nail to determine if they really intended to go through with it, before he made up his mind to do what he had to do, if it was clear that he wasn't going to stay more.

What he had to do, at the last minute, if it became clear they intended to make him sit and tried to tie the straps, was take as many as he could with him. Beneath his dirty gray jacket, on a string around his neck, hidden by his jacket collar being b.u.t.toned, was the blade: a common steel table knife purloined two weeks ago from the mess hall, and then slowly sharpened on the concrete floor, hour upon hour, silently, until it was pointed like a dagger and razor-sharp on both sides. He was going to get Fat Gabe first, then Short Leg, and then take their guns out of their holsters and shoot the rest of the witnesses. He was going to save Bobo for last, right after shooting the warden. He wanted to watch Bobo sweat. He wanted to be sure that Bobo was sober enough to understand what was happening to him, and then he would make Bobo sit down in the chair and get a few low-voltage jolts of his own medicine. He would make Bobo learn a few things before he died.

Jimmie Mac the preacher stepped up to him and said, "Brother Chism, have you managed to say any prayers?" Jimmie Mac's breath frosted like smoke in the cold air. Nail shook his head and wondered in what order of execution he would have to kill Jimmie Mac. Maybe right before the warden. Right after he did the lady.

The lady, wrapped in a double-breasted melton coat but wearing a simple hat without feathers or anything fancy, wasn't supposed to be there. The law said you got twelve witnesses, and all twelve had to be men. You couldn't invite your mother or your sister or your girlfriend. It wasn't decent to make a woman sit through such a thing, to make her hear the hollering and the sizzling, to make her watch the twisting and jerking, to make her smell the awful stink of roasting flesh. It was sure to make her puke, or swoon, or both.

But this lady worked for the newspaper. She had sat beside Nail when they watched Skip get it, and when Nail himself had screamed at Bobo, "G.o.dd.a.m.n you, Bobo, turn up the juice and leave it on!" she had put a hand gently on his arm to calm him down. The hand she had rested on his arm held a drawing-stick, a charcoal pencil she'd been using to make a sketch of the black boy, and in resting her hand on his arm she'd accidentally left a mark of charcoal on the back of his hand, and he had worn that mark for days and days before was.h.i.+ng it off, as a reminder of what he'd watched, and what she'd done. She was a cool customer. Probably she wasn't even a lady. She probably cussed and drank and even smoked cigarettes when n.o.body was looking. Her red hair wasn't as long as a lady's hair ought to be. She drew good pictures, and Nail had never even heard of a lady artist. Maybe he would shoot her between the warden and Bobo.

The warden, Mr. Burdell, stepped up beside Jimmie Mac and said, "Okay, McPhee, you can say a short prayer for him."

"He aint repented," Jimmie Mac told the warden.

"Skip the prayer, then," Mr. Burdell said, and turned to Nail. "Chism, you got any last words?"

"Yessir, I do," Nail said. "How come there aint but nine witnesses?"

Mr. Burdell looked around the room, moving his lips and his index finger as he counted. He spoke the last two aloud: "...eight...nine..." He hesitated, then grinned. "Ten, counting you, Chism. Aint you gonna witness this yourself? And if you want to count Ole Sparky hisself, there, that makes eleven." Fat Gabe and Short Leg laughed at their boss's wit.

"That's still one short," Nail protested.

Mr. Burdell stopped grinning and looked tired and irritated. He said, "It don't make no difference."

"It aint legal," Nail said. "Also, it aint legal to have that lady there."

The warden turned to the woman and smiled. "Miss Monday," he said. "Are you legal?"

She did not return his smile. She shook her head.

The warden glowered fiercely at Nail and said to him, "Okay, Chism, it's cold in here and the sun's fixin to go down, and it's gittin real cold. Let's git this over with. You want to say anything important? You been actin like you're just out on a stroll to a picnic or something. You gonna be a real good boy and take this peaceful-like and easy, huh? Or do you want to start hollerin a bit and git it out of your system?"

Nail looked down at his hands. The trees were singing, Stay more, stay more. His hands were still bound together with cuffs. They would have to unlock the cuffs in order to strap his arms to the chair. In the instant between, he would reach inside his s.h.i.+rt for the razor-sharp dagger. He was conscious of the woman sketching his picture in her drawing-pad. With his head shaved smooth as an egg, he wasn't much of a sight. The picture she'd drawn of Skip had made him look old and scared to death, although he was just sixteen and real brave for a colored boy. Nail wondered if the picture she was drawing of him was honest.

"Any last request?" Mr. Burdell asked him. "You aint got time for a cigarette."

Nail inclined his head toward the woman. "Could I see the pitcher she's drawin? That's all."

Mr. Burdell walked over and leaned down and spoke to Miss Monday. She said something to the warden. He returned and spoke to Nail: "She aint finished with it yet."

"Could we jist wait jist a second, till she's done?" Nail requested.

Mr. Burdell grunted, and hauled out his pocket watch and opened the gold cover of it. He stared at it for a time. He glanced at Miss Monday, and then at Nail. "Law says you got to be dead before the sun disappears," he said. He walked back over to where Miss Monday was sitting, and stood behind her chair, watching her draw. He looked back and forth between her drawing and Nail's face, as if he were comparing the two. Nail tried to look pleasant. He stared straight at Miss Monday, and from time to time she raised her head from her work and looked him right in the eye for a long moment. She was a pretty girl, even if she was cold as ice. Her eyes were sort of greenish...it was hard to tell in this light. Her skin was the palest, whitest flesh he'd ever seen. Red hair, green eyes, white skin: she was a picture herself.

While he posed in the last minutes of his life, he planned every move that he would make, trying to guess exactly what they would do while they were still able, before he took over. Fat Gabe would unlock the handcuffs. Short Leg would push him down into the chair. Fat Gabe would commence strapping his left arm while Short Leg would reach for the strap to do his right, and at that instant Nail would whip out the blade and slash it across Fat Gabe's throat in one left-to-right motion that, continuing, would bring the point of the dagger in line with Short Leg's heart, where Nail would thrust it forward, reaching in the same blink of an eye for Short Leg's holster...

Oh stay more! sang the trees, and Nail sang back, I'm doing my best! And apart from the singing the only sound in the cold, darkening room was the skritch-skritch of the woman's charcoal pencil as she drew on and on.

Off.

Up on the lilting mountain far above the village is a farmplace so old the trees still sing of it, but n.o.body else does. The trees, a fat maple and a gangling walnut, left to grow for shade a hundred years ago when they were already old, about the time Nail Chism was born, don't really talk each other's language, but they sing a tune together, a kind of soughing ballad, a ditty maybe just of fragrances, leaf-smells in the sunlight that drop an octave in the moonlight, heard or smelled attentively by owls who roost there, and a nightingale, wondering at a treesong about people named Chism, whose farmplace it was when sheep still grazed the orchard gra.s.s, yarrow, and sweet-scented vernal, now grown to scrub, tangled with emerald vines and turquoise nettles. The leaning house behind the tilted white-paling gate was lived in for a few years just recently by some young people from another state who raised goats and marijuana, distant echoes of the sheep who had once grazed there and the corn whiskey moonlighted in the hollow down below.

Nail Chism helped his older brother Waymon and his kid brother Luther in the making of Chism's Dew when the moon was right, but neither brother helped Nail in the keeping of the sheep, who were his alone, or even in the shearing of them, when the moon was right, in its waxing. There were a hundred and sixty acres on the Chism place: eighty downhill plowed to corn for the making of vernacular bourbon, eighty upland sown to timothy, meadow foxtail, white clover, and fescue, with a good bit of parsley mixed in among the yarrow and the sweet-scented vernal, to feed Nail's flock, which numbered rarely less than a hundred or more than two hundred, including three or four rams to service.

The colors of the pasture gra.s.ses rose from deep jade and Kelly to light Nile and spring green, and each midsummer Nail sowed the bare spots of the fields with a bushel of mustardseed, the mustard adding sulphur to the diet of the sheep and adding yellow-green to the colors of the pasture, intensifying them in keeping with the heat of the sun and Nail's keeping. The rape was sown in July and August for a fall feeding.

Rape, a primitive cabbage, Bra.s.sica cousin to mustard, is a purplish shade of green at its base, but the leaves are an intense phthalo green (p.r.o.nounced without the ph, which reminds me of the one they used to tell about Nail in his schooldays: the new schoolmarm steered clear of questions that might get an argument out of him, and she wouldn't protest when he told her right off that he didn't intend to spell "taters" with a p, regardless of what the book says). Two pounds of rapeseed sown to the acre is enough; too much rape will cause the sheep to bloat. Some folks who didn't like the word "rape" called it colza, but the rest of us never knew what they were talking about.

But it is the other kind of rape that dwells at the heart of this story, so it won't do to confuse the issue by describing all that rape out in Nail's pastures. He also grew a lot of turnips, because his sheep liked both the tops for forage and the pulverized roots as a main treat in the winter, and turnips never got anybody thrown into the penitentiary. The turnip top is a light, whitish green, not very intense, cool, a gentle shade that belies its pungent taste. Of course Nail never broadcast the turnip seeds but grew them separately in a fenced-off garden.

He grew a different kind of turnip for his mother to cook for greens with sowbelly, or mashed up like taters, or baked into a pie (yes, with sorghum sweetening, turnip pie is the best there is). In the Ozark Mountains garden truck is generally the womenfolk's work, and some people raised an eyebrow at Nail Chism out yonder under his felt hat in the garden patch a-chopping weeds out of the ingerns, or onions, but most folks just said that was the least of his peculiarities, and better to let it go.

The sheep were his princ.i.p.al peculiarity. Not that sheep were so rare in the Ozarks (they weren't at all in those days), but that a genuine shepherd was. If a man wanted to make a dollar or two every April from selling the wool, he'd keep a ewe (anybody who had one p.r.o.nounced it "yo") out behind the house where the dogs couldn't get it. He wouldn't think of eating it; n.o.body ate mutton, let alone lamb, in the Ozarks, where "meat" meant only pork, nothing else. (Pork can be salted and cured and preserved, but mutton cannot.) When the ewe got too old to be sheared, fourteen or so, and hadn't died of natural old age, its owner would just let it go to rot or rust through neglect, and bury it, or take down the fence separating it from the dogs.

Nail Chism was the only man anybody knew, or even heard of, or read in the papers about, who kept a whole pastureful of sheep, and he spent most of his time, when he wasn't tending the vegetable patch or helping his brothers with the whiskey still, living with the sheep and watching after them. We could hear him up there a mile off calling, "Sheep! sheep! sheepsheepsheep!" He knew everything there was to be known about sheep. He knew how to get the yolk just right-for anybody else, that meant the yellow part of an egg, but Nail would explain it was the soapy or greasy stuff on the fleece: too little yolk, and the sheep wasn't getting the right mix of greens or else had been sired by an inferior ram, and the fleece would be dry and coa.r.s.e; too much yolk, and twenty pounds of sheared fleece would weigh only four pounds after the first was.h.i.+ng.

Every April, Nail Chism rented from Willis Ingledew's livery a wagon, which he loaded with fleece to the sky, or at least to the lowest tree branches, and drove to Harrison, a week's journey there and back, where he got the best dollar for his "crop." Some folks wondered why Nail Chism even needed to join his brothers in the manufacture of illicit vernacular bourbon (those weren't their words for the stuff) if he made a downright good living year in and year out from what he got at Harrison for his fleece. The answer, if you troubled to ask him, was simply that the Chisms had been making the best drinking-whiskey in the Ozarks ever since Nail's grandaddy had come from Tennessee back in 18 and 39.

It was a family tradition, which Seth Chism had elevated to just about the acme of quality and repute and had instilled in his sons from the earliest they'd been able to plow the corn or fire the biler. Nail, Seth's middle boy, had been made superintendent of the biler at the age of fourteen and had become a professional moons.h.i.+ner long before the day he became a captive audience for a traveling peddler, name of Eli Willard, who was trying to unload a pair of Cotswold lambs he'd been swapped for out of something in Kentucky.

In those days the village reached its top size, the closest Stay More ever came to being a real town, with the Ingledews running a big three-floor general store as well as the post office and the gristmill, and getting compet.i.tion from no fewer than three other general stores; there was almost a genuine Main Street of the kind a.s.sociated with the motion picture called a western (although the surrounding countryside looked nothing at all like the stark badlands of the westerns: it was too green, had too many shades of green, was too lush and too uplifting, the hills rising steep and pastured and forested and bluffed), and along this Main Street there were two doctors' offices and two dentists as well as Jim Tom Duckworth's law office and at least three blacksmiths with the latest tripod gear-driven quickblast forges, and even, by the time this story really gets going good, a bonafide bank waiting to be robbed, and around the corner you'd find such things as Murrison's sawmill and William Dill's wagon factory, making some of the best horse-drawn vehicles still competing with the just-arrived automobile.

Eli Willard hadn't yet discovered the automobile when he arrived in the thriving village with two Cotswolds in the back end of his wagon (a William Dill spring-platform model he'd bought at the factory his last trip to town, and reputedly driven to Connecticut and back without a broken wheel). Everyone in the Ozarks who did have sheep had a breed called American Merino, but the Cotswold, unbeknownst to Nail, who knew nothing about sheep at that point, is superior to the Merino for the production of wool.

The peddler Eli Willard was not in the business of purveying livestock; he just happened to have the two lambs this trip around, which actually was devoted to the selling of musical instruments, everything from parlor organs to Jew's harps. For thirty-five cents Nail also bought from him a harmonica, a fitting accompaniment to sheep-raising. It was an M. Hohner Marine Band Tremolo Echo, and Nail taught himself how to make it tremble and to make it echo, when he wasn't too busy teaching himself how to keep Cotswolds happy and healthy and reproductive. The trials and errors of this operation, had they been known to the other people of Stay More, would have made for all the jokes anyone would ever want to tell on Nail Chism, but he suffered his self-education in absolute privacy, and he practiced "Fisher's Hornpipe" and "Billy in the Low Ground" and "Sook Pied, Sook Pied, Come an' Git Yore Nubbins," in complete seclusion from any ears except those of his sheep, who seemed to appreciate him and would sometimes blaat along.

What did he look like? He was very tall, the loftiest of the Chism brothers, at six feet three inches, and muscular without seeming strong, with a shock of very light brown hair, not quite blond as the newspapers would describe it, stuck up in what folks chose to call his sheeplick. He had blue eyes. The Arkansas Gazette's drawing of him in December of 1914, by their staff artist Viridis Monday, does not fairly represent him, with that head shaved of its prematurely whitening locks (he was not yet twenty-eight) and that splendid physique looking frail beneath its prison clothes. Only the eyes in the Monday drawing seem to be the Nail Chism that most of us remembered: pale, gentle, comical, inquisitive, curious, and brighter-than-you'd-like-to-think: certainly not the eyes of a man on his way to the electric chair. Nail Chism was n.o.body's fool. And yet there were those who liked to think that he was everybody's fool.

One of those was his brother-in-law Sewell Jerram, of Jasper, the county seat, some ten miles north of Stay More. Sewell, or Sull as everybody but his mother p.r.o.nounced it, had been born in Stay More but thought of himself as a town boy, although Jasper back then was already what it still is: the smallest county seat in the state of Arkansas, with just a few hundred people, and being a town boy in a small village didn't leave Sull Jerram conspicuously different from a country boy; an outsider from, say, Little Rock wouldn't have been able to tell them apart. But Sull Jerram didn't know anything about farming, and the three brothers of Irene Chism, when Sull was courting her, got considerable amus.e.m.e.nt out of observing Sull's ignorance of country ways and customs.

Irene Chism was but a half-sister to Nail and his two brothers. Her mother, and senior by only fifteen years, was Nancy Nail Coe, whose father Jethro Nail, one of the first settlers of Newton County, had married a Choctaw Indian girl, making Nancy Nail a half-breed, and thus Irene and her brothers Waymon, Nail, and Luther were quarter-breed Indian, although the only thing about Viridis Monday's portrait of Nail to indicate such Indian ancestry is his somewhat long nose and his intense but blue eyes beneath their heavy, crowding eyebrows.

Nancy Nail had been taken to wife at the age of just fourteen by a Stay Moron named Columbus Coe, but she had been widowed at the age of sixteen, when Irene was an infant, and had inherited a homestead of eighty acres northeast of Stay More, which she was determined to manage on her own and succeeded in running-cornpatch, pigpen, cowlot, and orchard-for nearly a year before asking her neighbor, Seth Chism, for a little help with the heavy lifting. Seth was covetous of that cornpatch, a few acres to supplement his own, which all went to the making of his whiskey, and he proposed marriage to the young widow Nancy Nail Coe not so much out of desire for her as need of her cornpatch and her help running the still.

Waymon Chism was born just under two years after Irene, and they grew up together until Nail joined them. The three were in their teens, and had been joined by Seth and Nancy's last-born, little Luther, before their parents explained to them how it had come about that Irene was only a half-sister, not a full sister. That made no difference to Waymon, and the only difference it made to Nail was to explain to him how Irene was s.e.xually different from the three brothers: she had only half, or less than half, of whatever between-the-legs equipment the boys possessed. But then Irene began to acquire more than twice as much above-the-waist equipment, and Nail began to watch as his sister was courted by the town boy Sull Jerram.

Nail was Irene's favorite half-brother, the one she had given most of her attention and care in his upbringing, the one she (lacking a sister or a girlfriend) trusted with her secrets, and the one she chose to chaperone her whenever Sull Jerram came to call. In those days a girl never ever went off anywhere alone with a boy, not even walking together from the schoolhouse to home, not even walking together from Willis Ingledew's store to Jerram's store (owned by Sull's brother) down the road. It just wasn't done. A girl had to have someone else with her, even (lacking a sister or a girlfriend) her kid brother.

Country boys understood this, and n.o.body expected to get a girl alone by herself, or to find a girl alone by herself, much less, finding such a one, to speak to her. You had to be content to spark her as best you could with somebody eavesdropping, or at least with her sister or someone in the same room, or sitting on the next log, or walking a few paces behind. Maybe eventually, after you'd proposed to her and she had accepted and the date had been set for the wedding, you might get a chance to sit with her out on the porch or in the dogtrot for an hour or so without anybody else in sight, because the others would stay politely behind the door.

Maybe town boys didn't understand this. Sull Jerram always seemed annoyed when Nail tagged along on what pa.s.sed for dates between Sull and Irene. Of course Sull was a good bit older: he was already twenty-five, they said, when he first came to Stay More to call on Irene when she was just sixteen, and presumably he'd had some experience with some of the town girls who didn't have the sense to keep from finding themselves alone with him. Lord knows what those town girls did. The stories were enough to turn your ears pink. It's very doubtful a person from Little Rock could see a bit of difference between a Jasper girl and a Stay More girl, except the former might be wearing shoes, but probably not. People wondered why Sull Jerram didn't just stay in Jasper.

But Irene Chism was a very pretty gal, and her above-the-waist fixtures were full and high and firm, and, as Nail would have been the first to tell you, she had a voice that could have beguiled the Devil himself: sweet and musical and colorful. Her voice was almost as if she were touching you and patting you and stroking you and sliding herself all over you. Possibly Sull Jerram didn't care about her voice, but he sure cared enough about all the rest of her to spend every minute of his free time trying to get Nail to wander off and leave them alone for half an hour.

And Sull Jerram seemed to have an awful lot of free time. n.o.body knew for sure what he did for a living. n.o.body asked him. People who visited Jasper from time to time reported that "he's jist one of them fellers who hangs out at the courthouse": not the old men who sit on benches in the shade of the courthouse yard all day long telling lies, and not the lawyers who seem to hurry from room to room telling bigger lies, but the men who are just loitering in the lobby or the hallways, leaning up against the wall talking to one another in hushed voices as if they were cooking up lies that could be translated into money.

"Yeah, I reckon ye could say Sull's cookin up mischief," Jim Tom Duckworth told Seth Chism when Jim Tom dropped by to get his demijohn refilled. Jim Tom was Stay More's own native-born lawyer, our representative to the courthouse, our spokesman and champion before the bar of justice. "But jist whut-all mischief he's into, I couldn't tell ye. I do know that he's aimin to see if he caint git hisself elected a.s.s-essor, and I tell ye, once a man gits to be a.s.s-essor, next thing you know he's runnin fer treasurer, and then watch out if he don't run fer sherf, or even jedge."

Whatever Sull Jerram was running for, it didn't claim any of the attention he devoted to pursuing Irene Chism, or to trying to get Nail to leave them alone for a little bit. Nail couldn't be bribed. He couldn't be threatened. He could be cajoled, that is, he would politely listen to cajolery, but he wouldn't necessarily respond to it.

The first words Sull Jerram ever spoke to Nail Chism were: "Go tell yore momma she's a-lookin fer ye."

And young, green Nail actually took several steps in the direction of carrying out this request before it dawned on him that it was a trick, a foolery of words; Sull and Irene were laughing at him. Some time later Nail was wary when Sull told him he'd seen a man just back up the road a little ways giving away puppies. "Hurry, and you'd catch him," Sull suggested, and Nail was almost out of sight, this time, before he realized it was just another trick.

Once, eventually, Sull Jerram told Nail that he and Irene and Nail, just the three of them, were going to walk up to a glade on the side of Ledbetter Mountain where there were a lot of snipes. A snipe is a kind of bird, Sull explained, although Nail wondered why a town boy would claim to know more ornithology than he himself knew, and he knew there weren't any snipes, not of the sandpiper sort, in the vicinity of Ledbetter Mountain. Sull explained that these snipes only migrated through at certain seasons, and there was this glade up yonder where them snipes liked to visit. Sull gave Nail a towsack made of burlap. "Now what we're gonna do is," Sull explained when they got to the glade, "is me and Irene are gonna go over thar in that bresh and wave our arms about and flush 'em out of thar, and you stand over yere with this yere sack, and when they come a-runnin, you jist herd 'em into the sack. See?"

"Birds don't run," Nail said. "They fly."

"Not these yere snipes," Sull said. "Now you jist do like I tell ye, and we'll have us a mess of good eatin fer supper tonight."

Nail watched them disappear, or almost. It is very bad luck to watch someone walk all the way out of sight. He had never seen anybody walk out of sight, least of all his sister Irene, who had rarely ever been out of his sight before, except when she'd gone out to the bushes on a call of nature. Maybe, he thought, waiting and turning aside so as not to watch them disappear, she's on another call of nature, kind of.

They did not return, nor were there any snipes or other birds, except a pair of prothonotary warblers. After half an hour Nail began to look for Irene and Sull, and then to call for his sister, but he got no answer. That night she apologized for the trick Sull had played on him.

"Where did you'uns go?" Nail asked. "What didje do?"

"Oh, honey," she said in her musical voice, "sometimes I jist need to git away from you." She asked him not to tell anybody else what had happened.

He was careful not to let her out of his sight again, and he was within earshot when he heard his mother start in to faulting Irene for being "knocked up," whatever that was. He listened. His mother began hollering. Then she called for him, and he came, and she said, "Nail, chile, you was sposed to keep a eye on her and Sull, and watch 'em, and pick gooseberries, and take keer of her."

"I did," Nail lied.

His mother slapped him. It was the first time she had ever hit him in the face. His pappy had clobbered him frequently, but never before had she slapped his face. Irene protested in tears that it wasn't Nail's fault, that Sull had pulled one on him, that there wasn't no call to hit Nail for what Sull had done. But Nail didn't hang around to listen to the rest of it. He fled up the mountainside to a cavern by a waterfall and stayed there, meditating on the injustices of life in this world.

He didn't go to the wedding. It wasn't much of a thing anyhow, although his brothers told him of all the food he'd missed out on, pies you'd never heard of before. Nor did he join the s.h.i.+varee that was thrown to tease the newlyweds. He couldn't stand the sight of Sull Jerram, and any man with any sense at all should have been able to tell from Nail's eyes that he couldn't stand the sight of him and wanted him off the earth, but Sull was a town boy and all he saw in Nail's eyes was a dumb, sullen kid.

Irene Chism Jerram miscarried her baby and never had any children after that. The years went by. Sull was elected a.s.sessor, and folks said the only thing that kept him from running for sheriff was he was too trigger-happy. Irene lived in Jasper but would come home about twice a year for a long visit until Sull came to get her. One of the times he came to get her, or tried to, was in an automobile, the first car to get that far. Eli Willard had driven the first automobile to appear in Stay More, but he hadn't been able to drive up Right p.r.o.ng, because there wasn't any road, just a trail; when Sull Jerram tried it, there wasn't any road either, but he was mad to get Irene back and he drove over some boulders and plowed down some saplings to get up to the Chism place and spooked the livestock and, according to Seth Chism, spoiled a whole batch of sour mash a-brewing at the hooch plant. Irene wouldn't go with him. He stayed for a few days, arguing with her, trying to persuade Nancy or Seth to talk some sense into her, and, finally, appealing to Nail himself.

"You're the only one she listens to," Sull told Nail. "She don't listen to me nor n.o.body. You tell her that she caint spend the rest of her life up here on this mountain."

"Why caint she?" Nail asked. He wasn't a kid anymore and was half a head higher than Sull Jerram and still remembered as if it were yesterday the tricks Sull used to pull on him.

"Why, because, she's, don't you see? she's my wife, and if she wants to be my wife she's got to live in Jasper." Sull paused and studied Nail's eyes. "Don't that make no sense to ye? Do you want me to say it again?"

"If I was you," Nail said, "I'd git that piece of machinery back down the mountain while it will still roll. Come tomorrow, you might not find any wheels left on it."

But Sull Jerram did not go back to Jasper. Someone said he'd spent the night down at the Whitter place, and folks laughed and said the Whitters was probably the only ones who'd give him a bed, he was that low, they was that low, the Whitters. Some years before, not long after the turn of the century, the only criminal Stay More ever had, in its peaceful history, had come from that family. Ike Whitter had killed a man and terrorized the sheriff himself before a lynch mob led by John Ingledew ganged up on him and stopped him and lynched him. But Ike's father Simon Whitter still ran the farm and kept his head high and apologized to no man for having sired the only bully, felon, and cutthroat in the history of the village, and some of Ike's younger brothers threatened to become as wayward as he had been, while his baby sister Dorinda was growing up into a turtledove who, it was said, would drive men to rash deeds and early graves.

After a few nights at the Whitter place, Sull loaded all the Whitter boys into his vehicle and took them into Jasper to see the sights. Dorinda would have gone too, young as she was, if she'd had her way about it, but not even the Whitters, low as they were, would have condoned a young girl going off to the county seat with a married man and n.o.body to chaperone her but her brothers.

Dorinda threw a tantrum that almost cost her the friends.h.i.+p of her best girlfriend, who was me. The south benches of Ledbetter Mountain were all that separated the Whitter place from the Bourne place, and my dad Saltus Bourne was all that separated Simon Whitter from being the poorest farmer in Stay More. This isn't my story, and I'm not going to say anything more about my father, except that he and Simon Whitter were friends only because n.o.body else would have anything to do with them, just as people used to say of me that I was Dorinda's only friend because neither she nor I was able to find anyone else as cheap or as bad or-they said this too-as beautiful as ourselves.

Oh, she was beautiful, there's no dispute of that, and those who wondered how a man as grossly repulsive as Ike Whitter could have had a baby sister as magnificent as Dorinda were the same who said that Saltus and Fannie Bourne must have adopted me. But I'm not going to say much else about myself, except that I was Dorinda's best friend, off and on, for all the years that this story took place. We always sat together in school at the same double-desk, even when Miss Blankins.h.i.+p kept on holding Dorinda back a grade after promoting me, because Dorinda simply didn't want to learn how to read, or couldn't, and we always put our arms around one another at recess, and kept them there, and in the days of our growing up and filling out we always compared ourselves in every little detail and told each other that you are more pretty than me.

Now, that day Sull Jerram took her brothers to Jasper and wouldn't take her, she had a fit and cussed and broke up some things in our playhouse. The back of her father's forty met the back of my father's forty at a ba.s.so profundo oak tree way up on the ridge of Ledbetter Mountain, and beneath that oak we'd long ago carried some planks of sc.r.a.p lumber from Murrison's and stacked and nailed them against one another in a shelter against the wind and rain and winter chill, and inside that small s.p.a.ce we had our secret home with a few shards of china and mostly stoneware, some chipped gla.s.ses and rag napkins, dolls we'd outgrown now and cast-off calendars for the years from 1908 to 1911, when we'd still been children. Dorinda was not a virgin. Sure, I've heard the j.a.pe that by definition hereabouts it's a five-year-old girl who can outrun her brothers, and Dorinda was way past five and had six brothers. Ironically, it was the only one of the six brothers who was younger than her. We had invited him to the playhouse, Lewis, when he was just ten, I was nearly twelve, and Dorinda was already twelve. Although she was older than me, I had "accomplished" one thing she had not: I had lost my virginity, and without the help of any brothers, for I had none. He was a cousin, and twice-removed at that, named Every Dill, a year older than me, a year ahead of me in school, and a virgin himself. It had been almost happenstance, not premeditated, one night when I'd been left alone at his folks' cabin while they and my folks and sisters and everybody else went off to a funeral. Nothing I'd care to go into here, except to say that Dorinda knew about it and envied me it, and now was determined to lose hers too, even if to her own brother Lewis. He was the first boy ever to go inside our secret house, and Dorinda had dared me to do it with him since I already had experience, and I'd taken the dare but lost my nerve while he was trying to position himself atop me, and she'd said, when I got cold feet, that she'd do it herself, and Lewis didn't care which one of us it was, so long as he had a hole he could enter. Of course he wasn't old enough to make babies, but he was sure old enough to do it, in the sense of what they actually placed inside of what, and how they moved, and how long it lasted, and the noises they made. I watched, but they seemed to forget I was there. Watching them do it, I wondered if I had looked like that and sounded like that and smelled like that when I had done it with my cousin Every.

There was one big difference, I learned later. I had fooled around that one time with my cousin Every out of curiosity and pleasure and maybe even something approaching love. But Rindy had done it for revenge. She was b.l.o.o.d.y, and she showed the blood to her mother and told her parents who had done it, and Simon Whitter thrashed poor Lewis nearly to death, and later Rindy told me and laughed and said that was her way of getting even with Lewis because he was his mother's favorite and got extra dessert when she didn't.

So when Dorinda told me, much later, that she wanted Sull Jerram, wanted him real badly, my first reaction was to ask, "What's he done to ye that ye want to git back at him for?"