The Choiring Of The Trees Part 27

"Caint do it, this time," Doc says.

Viridis listens in wonder as the two men invite and counter-invite each other until finally Nail says, "Wal, come back when ye kin stay longer," and the doctor is allowed to leave.

She walks him to his horse and thanks him and repeats Nail's invitation. Then she asks, "When you told us to be good, just how good did you have in mind?"

He grins, and blushes a bit. "I was jist tryin to be silly," he says. "I didn't mean nothin by thet."

"So it wouldn't hurt him if we..." she begins, but can't quite find the words.

"Lak I said, don't let him do nothin that caint be done in bed," the doctor says. He climbs up on his horse and turns to go. His parting words are spoken down to her. "But I imagine there's quite a heap of things a body can do in bed, besides sleep." He starts to ride away. She waves. He stops the horse, reins it, holds it; he sits there listening, looking not at her but off at the forest. "Do you hear that?" he asks. He glances at her for confirmation, and she smiles and nods her head. "What d'ye reckon is makin that purty sound?"

"The trees," she says. "They're singing."

"Is that what it is?" he asks. "Wal, how 'bout that? Don't that beat all?"

"It surely does beat all," she agrees, and the good doctor, shaking his head in wonder, rides away.

And as soon as she gets back to Nail's bedside, she wants to know: "Don't you hear them?"

"Yeah, but the doc tole me this medicine would cause that."

"You haven't taken the medicine yet," she points out. "But you're going to, right this minute." And she fetches a spoon from the implements she h.o.a.rded for him and makes him take his quinine.

Some of it dribbles down his chin, and he raises his hand to wipe his mouth, but she stops his hand and licks up the dribble herself. It is very bitter; both of them make faces. She explains she did that to see what it tastes like.

He is looking all around, as if searching for something. She asks him what he's looking for. "Bird," he says.

"What bird?"

"The guard, Bird. I caint believe he's not watchin us. I caint believe we're all alone."

She gives him a long kiss, a very long one, longer than any she'd ever done with Bird watching. He tastes of quinine, but she's already tasted it, and it doesn't bother her. When finally she breaks the kiss (realizing it would be up to her to start or break anything), she asks, "Would Bird have let us do that?"

"I reckon he must be off-duty," Nail observes, grinning.

"There's not even a table between us," she remarks.

"Just these soppin bedcovers," he observes.

She squeezes the fabric of the quilts and blankets, which are wet from his perspiration, although he has not been sweating for some time now. She whips the bedclothes off him. "There's not much sun left in the afternoon," she observes, "and I'd better hang these out to catch the last of it." She starts to carry out the bedcovers but turns. "Are you cold?"

"Not right now," he tells her.

She takes the wet blankets and quilts outside the cavern and drapes them in sunlight over the boughs of the cedars. She talks to the trees while she does it, and Rosabone thinks she's talking to her and lifts her head to listen. She talks to Rosabone too. When she returns to the cavern, Nail asks her, "Who were you talkin to?" and she tells him the trees and her horse.

She kneels beside the bed and, with him still in it, begins changing the sheet: this technique she learned years ago when her mother was bedridden: you roll them to one side to remove the old sheet partway, roll them to the other side to get the rest of it, roll them back when the fresh sheet's in place. But Nail is heavy; rolling him toward her, her hand slips and snags in the string around his neck, and she lifts it till her fingers hold the charm, the tiny golden tree. She's nearly forgotten her little Christmas present to him, and hasn't seen it since the day she bought it at Stifft's Jewelers and took it home and wrapped it in a wad of tissue to enclose in her first letter to him. Thinking of that, she remembers that somewhere in Rosabone's saddlebags is the bundle of all the letters she wrote him which they never let him have at the penitentiary, or which she has written in her idle hours in Stay More while waiting for him. More than a hundred pages, no, closer to two hundred: the story of her life, or all the parts of it she wants him to know, for now: her childhood in the big house on Arch Street, her brothers, her sister, her mother, and as much of her father as she can mention, for now. The story of her art lessons with Spotiswode Worthen. The story of her travels: an Arkansawyer in Chicago, in New York, in Paris, in London, in Arles, and then around the world with Marguerite Thompson Zorach. The story of her first visit to Stay More. The story of her visits to the governor. The story of the day she went to the ballpark to meet Irvin Bobo, and what happened that evening. All the stories. One of the letters contains a story of what was not actually allowed to happen but was only imagined: the night that the governor permitted her to spend in Nail's cell. Another one of the letters, written in the future tense and the second person, contains the story of what will not yet have happened: the first night they will actually spend together. But she did not know, when she wrote it, that he would be ill with malaria, so that story is overly romantic, although the setting for it is actually this exact place and time, this cavern, this night, this July.

Should she let him read it? It would tickle him, amuse him, and any good humor would be sure to help him get well. But it was rather immodest and even frank in its details. Wouldn't he be shocked? Wouldn't he consider her brazen or indecent?

"Why do you keep on holdin it?" he asks, trying to see her hand wrapped around the golden tree beneath his chin.

"I'm thinking," she says, and puts the tree charm back against his chest. Nestled there in the golden hair of his chest, the golden tree is like a mighty oak in a thicket of brambles. "I have a letter for you, if you'd like to read it."

"You bet," he says.

"But it's nearly two hundred pages long."

"What else have we got to do?"

She gives him a sidelong glance, and then she gives him a mock punch in the ribs. "You," she says. And then she says, "We've got lots else to do. For one thing, we've got to eat. I'd better start supper. What would you like?"

"Chicken'n dumplins," he announces.

"Sorry," she says. "The eggs haven't hatched yet. And besides, I don't know how to make dumplings. But tomorrow I'll go get your mother to teach me."

Nail laughs: the first she's heard him laugh in a long time. "You honestly would do that, wouldn't ye?" he tells her, delighted.

No, not only have the eggs not hatched, but there are no chickens to lay them. She wonders if they could keep a flock of fowl in this glen of the waterfall. Would the varmints of the woods get them? But she has seen no varmints. If there are wolves or bears hereabouts, they haven't made themselves visible.

For their first meal together, she is obliged to put together a light supper of crackers, cheese, and a tin of sardines. But she discovers she has no appet.i.te at all, not because the offering isn't appetizing. And he discovers he hasn't any appet.i.te whatsoever, not because he's ill.

Love has no stomach.

The supper uneaten, they keep close, she sitting cross-legged beside the pallet of his bed, he lying. After a while he suggests, "You could read it to me."

"What?"

"The two-hundred-page letter."

"Oh," she says, and again: "Oh." The light in the cavern is just enough to read by, but it won't remain that way long. She'll have to get up and light the kerosene lantern after a time. "Well." She thinks awhile, then says, warningly, "I'll blush terribly over parts of it."

"I'll like to see ye blush," he says. "I bet it makes your pale skin look healthy."

She laughs, but also warns, "I don't think I could even stand to read parts of it. Parts of it I wrote thinking you'd not even be near me when you read them."

"If you love me," he tells her, "you could read it all."

That's true. She says, "That's true, but parts of it are going to make me sound most unladylike."

"Those will probably be my favorite parts," he says. "Let's have it."

"Promise you'll never laugh."

"Aint there no funny parts?"

"Not deliberately funny," she says.

"Well, I won't laugh unless I hear ye laughin first."

She could always, she realizes, skip some of the parts. She could always censor part of it, and he'd never know...until the time came that he might want to read it over to himself, and then if he found the parts she'd censored and wondered why, maybe he would understand. Nail Chism, she honestly believes, will always understand.

So she gets up, and from one of the sacks in the cavern she fills her straw hat with oats, and takes it out to Rosabone, and sets it down where the mare can eat the oats. "Don't eat my hat," she says. Then she gets the bundle of letters out of the saddlebag. She pats the mare's neck and speaks some last words to her: "You'll hear me talking, Rosabone. All night long you'll hear me talking, but I won't be talking to you. You get some sleep, and we'll go back to the village in the morning."

All night long the mare hears her mistress talking. But surely, sometime in the night, the mare dozes off.

Viridis Monday holds nothing back. She reads it all. Once, after lighting the lantern and resuming, she asks him, "Is this boring you?"

"I thought you'd know me better than to ask a question like that," he says. "Don't stop."

But once again, much later, she interrupts herself to ask, "Does that shock you?"

He is smiling, not with mirth but with pleasure. "I reckon I can stand it," he allows, offhand.

And again, when she comes, in time, to the story of the night she thought she was going to be allowed to spend in his cell, and is describing in detail what she antic.i.p.ated, she hears his breathing quicken and what might be a gasp, and she stops to say, "Of course I'm just making up this whole part. It's just what I had imagined might happen."

"It happened," he says. "If you wrote it, it happened."

His saying that, his way of putting it, eases her, makes her more comfortable and confident with her own telling and her own invention. But it also perhaps leads to, or at least explains, what eventually happens this night, which is of course only written but also happening.

A strange thing: at some point she ceases to distinguish between what has been written and what is happening.

She has reached the present in her narrative: she has discovered that her narrative itself has switched from the past tense to the present tense and she is describing time as it occurs. She is surprised to discover herself reading a letter in which she describes what she is doing right now: sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cavern beside Nail's bed, reading him a letter in which she describes herself sitting cross-legged...

Tiredness might be a contributing factor; for Nail, it could be the effects of the quinine: a strange tinnitus that makes him hear not what she is saying but what he wants her to be saying. Is that it? Is she actually continuing to read from her actually written letter or simply describing aloud what happens as it happens? This is very strange, and no sound comes from Nail, except once when she stops and asks, "What am I saying? What am I doing?" and he observes, "You're asking yourself, What am I saying? What am I doing?"

All this night she has held nothing back from him. Her whole life, and every thought she's considered of any importance, has been laid bare to him. Her most secret and private imaginings have been put so clearly to him that they have become his own. Not just with candor, because candor implies a conscious opening up, and she has not been closed to begin with, but with total truth, she has turned herself inside out to him, and as the night wears on she discovers that she is naked and unashamed.

Never before, since her mother first clothed her, has she been naked to anyone except herself. But the nakedness of her body is as nothing; it is almost anticlimax, almost redundant. Especially because she has already written this in the letter too: I have on no clothes now. Now in the glare of coal oil light I am without a st.i.tch. It does not bother me that he is not following suit, because I have already seen him without a st.i.tch, in the death chamber, and because his time to be as bare as me will come later. Now is mine. His turn is later, after I have nothing left to reveal to him.

His turn comes at dawn. On this morning, the beginning of the alternate day of his two-day ague, the day he will not shake from cold or burn from fever or drip with sweat, he realizes that it is his turn, because she has told him everything she has to tell, given him everything she has to give, done for him everything that can be done.

Far off.

Well, I'll be!" I'll say, seeing Every Dill come walking up to my front porch, carrying a big earthenware bowl with a lid on it. It will be the first time I'll have had a good look at him since that night when I was eleven and I had to stay at his folks' house while everybody but me and him went to a funeral, and we wound up in the same bed.

"Good mornin, Latha," he'll say, and hold the big bowl out to me. "Maw said fer me to give ye this."

"Jist set it down there with them others," I'll tell him, and gesture toward the porch floor, where there will already be twenty-three a.s.sorted bowls, pots, tureens, ca.s.seroles, and other containers, each of them steaming with what I know is the same thing that's in his: chicken and dumplings.

"Yore dog will git it," he will object, nodding his head toward Rouser and continuing to hold the bowl out to me.

"Rouser's done et one of them, and licked the bowl clean," I will point out. "Caint you see how his belly's all pooched out? He won't eat another'n before suppertime leastways, and maybe by then we'll figure out what to do with that many bowls of chicken'n dumplins."

"Huh?" Every will say. "You mean everlast one o' them bowls has got chicken dumplims in 'um?" When I nod, he will say, "Wal, heck, Nail and that lady could never eat all of them in a month of Sundays, could they?" When I will shake my head, he will say, "Wal, heck, mize well take this'un on back home."

"Suit yourself," I will tell him.

"But Maw tole me to leave it, I'd better leave it, don't ye reckon?"

"Whatever ye think."

He will set the bowl down on the porch, but in front of the others so that it might get taken first when the time will come. He will study it. "Wal, heck," he will say, "it aint even dinnertime yet, but I wouldn't mind havin a bite or two of that myself, if ye'd lend me the borry of a fork."

"I'll git ye a plate," I will tell him and go into the house for a clean plate and a fork and a big spoon for him to serve up a pile with.

"Who's that out there?" my mother will ask.

"Every," I'll tell her. "Now we've got twenty-four bowls of chicken'n dumplins. But I think he's fixin to help eat part of one."

"Law sakes," my mother will say. "I never thought them Dills had a chicken around the place. Must've been a ole rooster."

I will take the eating equipment to Every, and I will watch him eat. He will eat as if it has indeed been a long time since he's had anything as good as chicken and dumplings, and I will reflect that given a chance he might even grow up to look and sound a little bit like Nail Chism. But right now he'll be just a fourteen-year-old towhead who's pretty well earned his nickname Pickle. I will scarcely be able to convince myself that I, who came awfully close to making love to Nail himself just yesterday morning, already lost my virginity to this boy a couple of years before.

This boy will pause in his chewing and ask, "What're ye thinkin about, Latha?"

I will manage a smile. "Us," I will say, "I aint hardly seen you since."

He will blush furiously. But he will pretend not to know what I'm talking about. "Since when?" he will ask.

"Since that night you crope into my bed."

"I never!" he will protest. "It was more lak you crope inter mine."

"The bed was in your house, and your folks owned it, but it was my bed at the time."

"But it was the bed I slept in every night of my life," he will point out.

"But you were sposed to sleep on a pallet in th'other room," I will remind him. "Don't you remember?"

"Yeah, but I reckon I was kind of groggy and conflummoxed," he will observe. "Heck, maybe I was even sleepwalkin."

"Every Dill," I will accuse him, "don't you even remember what you and me did?"

"Was you awake?" he will ask.

"Silly! We talked for an hour before we did it. Don't you remember?"

"Yeah, it kinder comes back to me," he will admit.

"I'm sorry to hear it ever left you in the first place."

A silence will ensue. He will be just standing there in the dirt yard beside my front porch, shuffling his bare feet in the dirt, hanging his head bashfully, poking his hands into the pockets of his overalls, and taking them out again. At length he will ask, without looking at me, "Did you not mind what we done?"