The Choiring Of The Trees Part 8

"I talked to everyone, Nail."

"Everyone? That's an awful lot of people."

Their allotted time was running out. She opened her purse and took out the bundle of pages and peeled off the top sheet. "Let me read the beginning," she said, and read: "'To His Excellency Governor George W. Hays. We, the undersigned, residents and voters of Newton County, Arkansas, do hereby solemnly pet.i.tion Your Excellency to consider the sentence of death under which our friend, Nail Chism, has been placed, wrongly we feel. We each and severally believe him to be innocent of the crime of which he was charged, and we humbly entreat Your Excellency to wield your authority to pardon him, or at least to commute the sentence of death.'"

Viridis held up the many sheets so that Nail could see the signatures. "There are 2,806 names here, in all," she said. "Of course, many of them are just X's, but in each case where the person was unable to write his or her name, I have filled it in beside the X. See?" She held up page after page for his scrutiny.

Nail peered at the sheets as closely as the screen would allow. "I declare, you've got everbody on there!" he exclaimed. And she did, and she knew it: people from all over Newton County but particularly the Stay Morons: all the Ingledews, Duckworths, Plowrights, Swains, Coes, Chisms, Bullens, Bournes, Murrisons, Cluleys, Dinsmores, Kimbers...yes, even the Whitters. Of course all of the names were male; a voteless woman's name carried no weight with the governor. But there was one female name, and Viridis held her forefinger on it and said, "Now, here's an X, but beside it there's an attempt to spell out the name. Can you make out the letters?"

Nail slowly read and spoke each letter. "D," he said. "O, and R, and I, and N, and-" He stopped, he looked up at Viridis, and his eyes were questioning so that what he said next sounded almost like a question but was actually a statement, just whispered: "It's her."

Viridis nodded. "Now, listen, Nail. Our time is almost up. I'm going to go home and try to write you some of the things that I don't have time to tell you, and I'll get Farrell Cobb to bring you the letter within a week. There's so much I have to tell you about my trip to Stay More. I have to tell you about Judge Jerram..."

"Don't tell me you met him too?"

"I had some very unpleasant encounters with Judge Sull Jerram. I'll tell you about it. I've got so many things to tell you, but for now our time has run out."

"h.e.l.l," Nail said. "They ought to give us thirty minutes, on account of I didn't get any visit time during January. I'm owed twice as much, aren't I?"

"You certainly are," she said. "But I can have only half of it. I've talked to Mr. Fancher-the one you call Short Leg-and he says that you can have another fifteen minutes for the time you didn't have in January." She smiled. "But not with me. There's someone else here waiting to see you. I've got to go. I'll be your first visitor for March. Good-bye for now, Nail. Take care, and promise me you'll try to eat whatever they give you."

"Who-? What-? Hey!" Nail protested, but before he could say anything else, she got herself out of there. In the anteroom she gave a sigh both of relief at getting out on time, in fifteen minutes, and of disappointment at not having been able to talk to him more.

Then she turned to the bench where the girl was sitting. "All right, Dorinda," she said. "You be a good girl and get yourself on in there."

Off.

Off she had gone to Stay More, in the middle of the winter, and we had met. To me, at first, she had been simply that stranger-lady everybody was already talking about so much that the gossip reached me before she did. The first I had ever heard of Viridis Monday was Bertha Kimber telling my mother, "Ay-law, Fannie, they's a womarn a-stayin down to the Ingledew big house and done rid her mare plumb from Little Rock!"

But Viridis did not ride the mare all the way from Little Rock, which would have taken forever even if she and the horse both had not frozen to death. No, she put the mare on a train, and they rode the train for most of the way, and she rode the mare only the last sixty miles or so of the trip...but that is getting ahead of the story.

Tom Fletcher did not want her to do it. The Gazette's managing editor tried not just once but on several occasions through December and January to dissuade Viridis from making the trip. When it became obvious to him that she would not be discouraged by the weather reports, deterred by horrendous descriptions of the Newton County terrain and roads (or lack of them), daunted by the obvious futility of the mission (Fletcher himself, he later confessed to her, had done some checking and sent a couple of seasoned statehouse reporters out to gather the facts and determine that Nail Chism was guilty, and that unless and until Arkansas joined the other states that had abolished the death penalty for rape there was not going to be any way to get the sentence commuted), diverted by a more interesting a.s.signment (he offered to let her cover the legislature's debate on whether or not Arkansas would go totally dry)-only then did he attempt to kid her out of the "mission" by making it seem an adventure into terra incognita: She would need, he said, to hire some guides, and an interpreter, and a band of bearers. She would need an English-Ozarkian dictionary and phrasebook. She would have to get herself a racc.o.o.n coat and a c.o.o.nskin cap and carry an elephant gun. As a joke, Tom Fletcher had the boys down in the pressroom print up a mock article, "Elephants in the Ozarks," which he left on her desk.

When it became clear to him (and he was a wise man as well as a practical joker) that nothing would stop her from going to Stay More, he called her to his desk and sat her down and apologized for having belittled her plan, and announced that he had given it some serious thought and decided not only to let her go but to take her himself. If she could just wait until early March when it warmed up a bit, he could get a few days off and borrow a Columbia touring car, which would get the two of them up there and back to Little Rock in no time. He had checked the route as far as Jasper, where, he knew, there was a fair hotel called the Buckhorn they could put up at. Separate rooms, of course, he added, and winked.

Viridis liked Tom Fletcher quite a lot, but she did not like the idea of waiting until March, or of having her own investigation paced and directed by her boss. If it was all the same to him, she said, she'd appreciate having her total independence.

When the time of her furlough from the Gazette approached, he called her to his desk again and laid out before her the timetables of the railroads. She could take the St. Louis & Iron Mountain train westbound as far as Van Buren, transfer there (after a night's layover at a fair hotel) to a St. Louis & San Francisco (or "Frisco") train, which would take her north to Fayetteville, or, rather, to Fayette Junction, the terminus of the Frisco's spur eastward to Pettigrew, where, after a night (at a fair hotel), she could hire a driver and buggy to take her over the mountains a day's ride (or a day and a half, at most) to Stay More. She ought to be able to make the whole trip, there and back, in a week.

Viridis thanked Tom Fletcher for his concern and his help, but she had already planned her itinerary, and her modus operandi. She intended to put her own Arabian mare aboard the Iron Mountain train, which she would ride only as far as Clarksville, then alight there and ride the mare northward for two days until she reached Stay More.

Tom Fletcher consulted his maps and tables. "But there aren't any fair hotels in that wilderness," he said. "And you're not going to camp out under the stars in this weather."

She smiled and told him she would manage, without any camping out. She was not taking a bedroll or any equipment other than a spare blanket for extra warmth if she needed it, and a heavy horse blanket for her mare. Her saddlebags-and she was using an American western saddle, not an English riding-saddle-would contain only her changes of clothing, one dress neatly folded, spare jodhpurs, extra shoes, her writing-pads, pencils, and her sketchbooks and drawing-supplies.

"Aren't you going to be armed?" Tom Fletcher asked, and when she showed him the derringer she kept in her purse, he laughed and said it might deter human molesters but wouldn't work against an elephant...or, okay, there weren't any of those, but there were real wolves, bears, and panthers. He persuaded her to accept the loan of a Smith & Wesson revolver, which, he said, would not kill wolves, bears, or panthers but would certainly intimidate them. Since, he warned, facility in the use of a revolver is not easily acquired, he offered to give her some lessons. "Let's climb into my Ford and drive over to Big Rock and shoot bottles."

That was their first "date." Emboldened, a day later he asked her to dinner. Tom Fletcher was a thirty-two-year-old bachelor possessed of a strong, handsome face despite overly bulging eyeb.a.l.l.s, and, as we've noted, wisdom and humor. He was a first cousin of a Little Rock literary light, then living in England, named John Gould Fletcher, who would later acquire a reputation as one of the Imagist poets. At dinner, in the restaurant of the Capital Hotel, Tom made one last effort to talk Viridis out of her "quixotical quest." Failing, he declared, "I'm awfully fond of you, Very, and if anything happened to you, I'd kill myself."

Nothing, really, happened to her, except for a couple of scares. She had the time of her life. Even her horse seemed enlivened by the adventure. The mare, which she'd owned now for nearly a year, was a grandniece of Gericault, her jumping horse of old, and although Viridis did not jump her a lot, she was capable of it. Viridis had named her after a famous French woman painter of the last century who had specialized in horses, Rosa Bonheur, but Viridis had shortened this to the playful "Rosabone," to which the mare responded. Before her sudden interest in Nail Chism, Viridis spoke only to Rosabone. Tom Fletcher pointed out to her the similarity between "Rosabone" and "Rocinante," the wretched horse of Don Quixote.

Rosabone did not balk at being loaded onto a cattle car of the Iron Mountain train; it was an enclosed car, albeit an unheated one, and Viridis draped her liberally with a thick horse blanket. Then Viridis settled down in the pa.s.senger car to watch as the train maneuvered the Baring Cross bridge over the Arkansas River into Argenta. The stations they pa.s.sed, or at which they briefly took on mail or an occasional pa.s.senger, on the way to Conway-Amboy, Marche, Wilder, Palarm, Mayflower, Gold Creek-were the same little jerkwaters and whistlestops she'd pa.s.sed through twice every weekend during her semester's attendance at Conway Central College and Conservatory of Fine Arts, and the sight of those familiar, almost identical cl.u.s.ters of wooden false-fronted stores and the little railroad depots brought back to her the impoverishment of her collegiate experience. She had come so far since those days, and yet, going back again now, especially as the train pulled in and stopped for a while at Conway, within sight of her old campus, she felt as if she were recapturing something she had lost, or getting another opportunity to do something she had neglected, the first time around.

Conway had really been the limit of her penetration into the Arkansas hinterland, and now, as the train left it and gathered speed to the northwest and the uplands, which she could see already in the distance, she felt that she was going to explore some recesses of her native state that she had not known before. The train followed a generally westward course paralleling the Arkansas River and pa.s.sing through towns, some of good size, that seemed to have been created by the railroad and had avenues flanking the tracks, and new business buildings: drugstores, hardware stores, furniture stores, even a small theater or two. Pa.s.sing through Atkins, she had a clear view of the new brick facade of the J.M. Maus Company, a two-story block that was more like a Little Rock department store than a backwoods general emporium. To one side of the store the wagons of trappers were unloading their contents of furs, fox and possum skins, to be traded for merchandise. The people, especially the men, did not exhibit any pretense or cultivation in their appearance; they were an antic.i.p.ation of the roughcast yeomen she would encounter in Newton County.

She rode into the sunset at Russellville, and thereafter the little stations the train pa.s.sed were illuminated only by single lights over their depot signs: Ouita, Mill Creek, London, Scotia, Piney. There are so many little towns out there, she reflected, and so many little lives, all of them strange to me. There are two aspects of travel by rail that she was acutely aware of: one is the sense of "out-thereness," of all that lies on both sides of this pa.s.sage; and the other is of this pa.s.sage itself, this channel, this extended tube through which one is pa.s.sed, with a beginning and an end.

She broke free in the middle. Halfway between Conway and Fort Smith, at Clarksville, she left this tube and entered the out-there. After a night at the St. James Hotel, where she sheltered Rosabone in the hotel's horse-barn, and after a good early breakfast of oats for the mare and oatmeal for the rider, they struck out northward along a winding road pointing toward the mountains. The morning was very cold but clear, the air bracing. Viridis let Rosabone set her own pace, with an occasional run on the downslope of hills. Horse and rider had not gone more than a few miles, as far as Ludwig, before they encountered the first signs of astonishment in bystanders or other riders. The other riders were all male, and they had to look twice to see that she was not, and then, if there were two or more of them, they had to do a lot of talking among themselves about this exceptional circ.u.mstance of a lone woman in pants riding astraddle. Yard dogs who ordinarily would have chased a pa.s.sing horse for a while ran out and took one sniff and gave her a tilted-head look. Women stood with their hands on their hips and their mouths open.

But there were not a lot of people. North of Harmony, which she reached at midmorning (and paused to admire the quaint stone church there), the fields gave way mostly to forests, with only an occasional farm before she reached the village of Ozone. How did she know, and later tell me, these names of towns-Ludwig, Harmony, Ozone? (There were no road signs in those days.) Because, in every village she pa.s.sed, she stopped to ask someone, just to be sure she was on the right road to Newton County. In the case of the last place, she said, "Ozone? That's an unusual name. Is it because of the quality of the air?" The air there, as elsewhere in the Ozarks, was sweet and clear and heady. "Couldn't rightly tell ye, ma'am," the man said. "Hit's jist been called thet, fur back as I can recall."

When, shortly after dark, at the top of a steep climb up Moon Hull Mountain, she reached a village that had a hotel, or something resembling one, although the simple sign said only hotell, and inquired of the village's name, a man told her it was called Loafer's Glory. Which indeed was its name (I had been there once with my mother, who had an aunt living there; it was the farthest I'd ever been from home), but officially, as far as the United States Post Office Department was concerned, an inst.i.tution that often made unfeeling mistakes, as I would come to learn to my sorrow, the place was named Fallsville, which it is still called on maps, at least those few maps which show it. There's nothing wrong with "Fallsville," and there was, as Viridis discovered the next morning, a pretty waterfall in the headwaters of the Mulberry River, but Loafer's Glory is a fine name for a town, almost as fine as Stay More. The Dixons, Bowens, Habbards, Rykers, Cowans, Durhams, and Sutherlands did as much loafing in their village as the folks in ours did of staying, which is to say, for as long as they could, until neither loafing nor staying was any longer possible or glorious.

Loafer's Glory is down in the southwest corner of Newton County, but Viridis didn't realize she had already reached the county of her destination. She still had a hard day's ride to go to reach Stay More. She and Rosabone needed a good night's rest, which the "Hotell," Sutherland's, provided. It was like no hotel she had been in before: two guest rooms upstairs sharing a common washstand, her room just large enough for an old-fas.h.i.+oned iron bedstead with a cornshuck mattress and a pair of light down quilts over it. The occupant of the other room was a traveling "drummer," or salesman, for a wholesale grocery outfit in Fayetteville. He tried to get friendly. He suggested to Viridis that they might get warmed up with a little peach brandy he had with him, but she declined, saying she'd had a hard ride today and expected a harder one tomorrow. She got up in the morning before he did and beat him to the washstand, and was finished with her breakfast before he came downstairs.

There is a Y in the main road at Loafer's Glory, and the left fork would have taken her into Madison County and toward Pettigrew, which Tom Fletcher had suggested as the terminus of her rail ride, but she took the right fork eastward toward Swain and Nail, a village named for the maternal grandfather of Viridis' obsession. She did not know this then, but she reached it in midafternoon, and, inquiring the distance and direction to Stay More (for it was here she would have to turn north again), was told that it was only six miles, but six rough, crooked, uphill miles, and she wouldn't be able to make it before dark.

She should have spent the night in Nail. Although the village had no hotel, or anything approximating one, any villager would have shown her hospitality and could probably have regaled her with stories about Jethro Nail, that maternal grandfather, from whom the hero of this story acquired a large measure of his sense of humor as well as his sense of injustice. But, so close to her destination, Viridis was eager to get on.

She would discover that Stay More had no hotel, or anything approximating one either...when she reached it. The reaching was hard. Of the whole journey from Clarksville, of her entire experience with bridle paths and trails and roads, those last six miles were the hardest. Indeed, that road from Nail to Stay More no longer exists today; it was the first road to be given back to the forest when the Ozark National Forest was set up; the southern entrance to, or egress from, Stay More has been closed off ever since. You could almost say that Viridis found a place you can no longer get to. Or, at least, that she used a path that can no longer be traversed. Or even that both place and path existed only in the creation of her fancy at that specific circ.u.mstance of time.

There were stretches where she had to get down and lead Rosabone. Places where Rosabone stumbled in the snow. Places where Viridis, down and walking, stumbled in the snow. Rosabone was getting very tired. It was growing dark, the forest canopy was obscuring what sky light there was, and Rosabone could not understand why they weren't stopping if it was dark. Viridis tried to talk to her, but she was talking to herself, whistling in the dark, afraid. Once, as both she and Rosabone stood panting at the top of some defile they'd climbed, surrounded by huge boulders and enormous trees, she heard a noise, as of branches snapping, which caused her to fetch the revolver Tom Fletcher had lent her and make sure it was loaded, and to walk on for a while with the revolver in one hand and the mare's reins in the other. She emerged into a clearing, dimly lit but still with enough light for her to witness the sudden spectacle of a huge bird swooping down and seizing a rabbit. She could not tell what sort of bird it was-eagle, hawk, falcon-but she could clearly identify the big white rabbit, who, strangely, she thought, made no protest or sound of any sort as the talons of the raptor lifted it off the ground and carried it ever higher out across the treetops and over the valley.

She moved on until she could see that valley, then stood looking into it for a very long while, resting, letting Rosabone rest. The last strips of the sunlit sky sank beyond the westward mountains. The moon rose, and it was full, and every star was there. The northern slopes of hills that she faced still were covered with snow, against which the black trunks and branches of trees made a vast and intricate tracery. The snow, in this light, seemed more blue than white, and everything was silent and still. One by one, far down below, people here and there lit their kerosene lanterns, and the pinpoints of light scattered across the valley forewarned Viridis of the number of people she must encounter before her mission would be accomplished. The whole scene reminded her of a village landscape at night as painted by van Gogh, although he had seen the moon and the stars far more pa.s.sionately than she could now feel. "Well, Rosabone," Viridis said, as she remounted the mare, "that is the end of our journey."

It was downhill from there on. When she reached the village, it was full dark, but the great moon and a few kerosene lanterns in windows gave some illumination to the buildings along Stay More's main street. Weeks after she had left Stay More, the next time the moon was full, I walked through the village one night attempting to see it as she had first laid eyes on it. Of course I knew each building, each house, and each store in a way that she did not: I recognized the dark, looming shape of Isaac Ingledew's gristmill, closed then because the Chism moons.h.i.+ning operation had used up all the cornmeal; another large building, whose triangular gable rose three floors up, I knew, pretending to be Viridis, would be one of my objectives: Willis Ingledew's General Store, where the men who would testify for Nail Chism congregated nearly every day, winter or summer; pretending to ride my horse on up the street, as she had, I pa.s.sed between the two doctors' clinics, on my left old Doc Plowright's board-and-batten wooden shack with false front, he who had examined Rindy Whitter, and on my right across the street the new clinic of Plowright's only compet.i.tion, young Doc Colvin Swain, a Stay More boy, just out of his training in St. Louis. The next building up from Doc Swain's was our princ.i.p.al business building, the ashlar stone Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company. I stood where Viridis had stopped her horse to stare at it, and then, as she had done, I let my eyes s.h.i.+ft northward across the Right p.r.o.ng Road (which she would take to get to my house as well as to the Chism place) to the only other general store on that stretch of main road, T.L. Jerram's, run by Sull's brother Tilbert. I must have stared at that one a little longer than she had, although then I couldn't even guess that one day I would own it and live there and have the post office in it, and that even at this present time my granddaughter Sharon would be living there still.

Viridis looked at what wouldn't become Latha Bourne's General Store and Post Office until June of 1932; there were lights of kerosene lanterns burning within the two wings of the store that were living quarters, and she was tempted to stop there first, just to ask for directions. It would have been ironic to ask Tilbert Jerram for help in the beginning of what would become her fight against his brother. But she did not. She turned Rosabone around and began to ride slowly back down Main Street. There were lights burning at Doc Plowright's, but I don't blame her for having a sense, even then, that he wouldn't be very sociable. Across the road she could see through the window of Doc Swain's, where Colvin was sitting at a table peering through a microscope, and something about that-and the moonlit s.h.i.+ngle hanging out front: C.U. SWAIN, M.D., doctor of human medicine-convinced her that he was a very busy young man who wouldn't take kindly to an interruption. She only wanted to ask for directions.

Didn't dogs bark at her? When I attempted to retrace her movements through the village and the surrounding countryside, weeks later in the moonlight, pretending to be her, some of the dogs pretended I was her too, and although they knew me they barked at me. Doc Swain's great big old hound Galen nearly attacked me, and Doc Swain raised his head from the microscope and came outside and said, "Hush, Galen! Down, you dumb bawler! Oh, it's you, Latha. What are you doin out this time o' night?"

"Jist a-playin like I was her," I said, and he knew who I meant. "And I was jist wonderin, did dogs bark at her that first night? Galen must've."

"I reckon he did, but I never took no notice," Doc Swain said.

If there was anyone who heard the village dogs barking at her and thought to go see who or what the dogs were barking at, it was probably that old lady who lived two doors down from Doc Swain, in the big fine two-story house directly across the road from Willis Ingledew's store. This house had been built way back around the time of the War Between the States by old Jacob Ingledew, who died the year before I was born. He had been the founder of Stay More, he and his brother Noah, and right after that war he had served for a time as the governor of the whole state of Arkansas. Compared with Governor Hays, who wouldn't pardon Nail Chism, he...but I'm digressing. This lady had been a friend of his wife's when they lived in Little Rock at the governor's mansion, and when Sarah Ingledew came back to Stay More she brought her friend with her, to stay. In this year of 1915 both Jacob and Sarah had been in the Stay More cemetery for going on fifteen years, but this lady, who inherited the house, still lived on there, and would continue to do so until sometime in the early twenties (I wasn't living in Stay More the year of her death, so I don't remember). To tell the honest truth, I never knew her name. Older folks who had known Sarah Ingledew just called her Sarah's Friend, and in fact that's all that you'll find on her tombstone. If she ever told Viridis her name, and she must have, it's not recorded.

But she came out on her front porch, wrapped in a thick afghan shawl, to see what the dogs were barking at...a.s.suming the dogs were barking. That porch runs the whole length of the big house, and it has fancy jigsaw Gothic bal.u.s.ters running along the edge of it, hardly more than an arm's length from the road, and the lady stood up against that porch rail and looked at that moonlit figure on horseback. Viridis stopped and turned Rosabone toward the lady and said, in that genteel Little Rock/Paris voice of hers, "Good evening, madam. This is Stay More, is it not? I've just arrived in town, and I'd like directions for finding the Right p.r.o.ng Road that goes to the Chism farm."

The lady smiled. "Which part of Little Rock are you from?" she asked.

Viridis was taken aback, to put it mildly, and her first thought was of some kind of conspiracy: somebody, maybe Nail himself, had gotten word to these people that Viridis was coming. But this woman was asking her which part of Little Rock she was from, as if there were divisions or distinctions, and-Viridis could not help noticing-this woman was not asking the question in the mode of expression or voice she would expect from a native of these parts.

"Why, the central part," Viridis answered. "Why?"

"Louisiana Street, Center, Spring, or Broadway?" the old woman asked.

"West of that," Viridis said. "Arch Street."

"I guessed as much. That's not exactly central. Well, as they say hereabouts, light down and hitch, rest your saddle. Come in and eat you some supper."

"I'm just trying to find the Chism place," Viridis said.

"You won't find it in the dark, or even this fine moonlight. Are they expecting you? They won't be able to give you a decent bed."

"I don't want to impose on you," Viridis said.

"Don't be ridiculous. I've room for your whole family, if you'd brought them with you. Well, maybe one of your brothers would have to sleep on the floor."

Viridis was delighted. She accepted the offer of hospitality and discovered that the woman had the whole large house to herself, eleven rooms, simply but tastefully furnished. Behind the house was a small stable, where Rosabone was housed comfortably for the night.

The woman had just been starting to prepare her own supper at the time Viridis arrived, and it was no trouble for her to make a double serving of everything: roast pork, boiled potatoes in their skins with chopped parsley, fresh garden kale (it survives January's freeze) cooked like spinach, and a light wheaten roll baked in a manner called Parker House. Viridis watched as these things came off of and out of a huge cast-iron and white enamel cookstove that gave off an additional fragrance of burning cedar logs, and of the sweet-potato pie they would have for dessert.

"Now," said the old lady, "if I can just remember where the governor left that bottle of Alsace wine. Excuse me." She disappeared upstairs, climbing the staircase with an agility that belied her years, more than eighty of them, Viridis guessed, and within a minute she returned, wiping the dust from, sure enough, a tall, narrow bottle of Gewurztraminer.

During the meal Viridis remarked, "You mentioned the governor. Were you speaking in the familiar sense of one's husband, father, superior, or employer?"

The old woman smiled with amus.e.m.e.nt. "He was not my husband, but he was my 'father,' you could say. He was definitely my superior, and certainly my employer." She paused to sip her wine, then added, "But Jacob Ingledew was also the governor."

"Of Arkansas?" Viridis asked.

"Don't the schools of Little Rock teach Arkansas history anymore?" the woman asked.

Viridis had actually taken mandatory Arkansas history in the eighth and ninth grades, but there had been so many governors and she couldn't remember their names. She asked, with a smile, "Which part of Little Rock are you from?"

"East of Main," the woman said. "Do you know the Pike mansion?"

"Of course!" Viridis replied. Her boss's cousins, the Fletchers, owned the mansion that had been built by Albert Pike. "Did you live there?"

"No," the woman said, smiling as if to excuse herself for misleading her guest, "but in the neighborhood, just a few doors to the east."

The conversation died for a few moments before Viridis decided to ask, "What are you doing in Stay More?"

"I'll be happy to tell you," the woman said. "But first you must tell me: what are you doing in Stay More?"

These two Little Rock ladies, the one eighty-six, the other sixty years younger, stayed up talking until bedtime, and even beyond, telling each other their stories and their reasons, very good ones, for being in Stay More. The old woman certainly knew about the trial and conviction of Nail Chism, although she did not know enough of the facts of the case to have any opinion on Nail's guilt or innocence. Summers she sat on her front porch and observed the men sitting on the storeporch across the way, and she knew which one was Nail, because he was taller than the others, younger than most of them, quieter, less inclined to joking although a quick audience for others' jokes, but of course she was in no position to say whether he had been there at his usual time on that particular afternoon, which was just one more June day in a pa.s.sage of rare ones. Yes, she knew of the Whitters; they were the "dregs" of Stay More society, and Dorinda's oldest brother Ike had been the town's ruffian and rowdy until the day the lynch mob disposed of him. The woman showed Viridis a number of plugged-up bullet holes in the walls of her front rooms, souvenirs of a raging gun battle Ike Whitter and his cronies had fought with the lynch mob, who had commandeered her house and required her to cower in a back room, frightened out of her wits, while every pane of gla.s.s in her house was shattered. This had happened ten years before, but the old woman still trembled sometimes in recollection of it.

At breakfast the next morning (Viridis had slept wonderfully and warmly on a thick mattress stuffed with goose down, beneath several heirloom quilts, in a big walnut four-poster in the one of the three front rooms that had been Sarah Ingledew's) the gracious old woman, urging a second helping of bacon and eggs on Viridis, said, "You aren't intending to wear those today, are you?" and indicated Viridis' jodhpurs.

"I expect to do a good bit of riding," Viridis explained.

The woman shook her head. "You might do some riding, but you won't do any visiting if you wear those." And when breakfast was finished, she suggested they take their third cups of coffee back into Sarah's room. Viridis, the woman observed, was the same size that Sarah had been. The woman opened a walnut wardrobe, then took down a dress and held it against Viridis for a moment, replaced it, and took down another, until she had one that she considered "not too dressy but good enough." Viridis protested that she couldn't ride Rosabone in that dress. "You aren't going to ride Rosabone," the woman said, and then selected the shoes, which were twenty years out of style and unlike any that Viridis had ever worn. And then the hat, or bonnet, rather. And a shawl. "And now the finis.h.i.+ng touch, what Sarah called her thanky-poke," the woman said, giving Viridis a purse to carry, a purse larger and fancier than any she would ever have dared hold in Little Rock. The woman turned Viridis to look at herself in the mirror and commented, "I declare, if it weren't for your red hair, you are Sarah." Viridis felt a bit uncomfortable, not because of the fit of the clothes or their being twenty years out of fas.h.i.+on but because she felt she had no right to be wearing the clothing of the former first lady of Arkansas. She expected to do a lot of local traveling and interviewing today, and she didn't want to expose the clothes to dirt and dust and snow and mud.

The old woman dressed herself in attire that was also from an earlier era, the 1890s, and then she led Viridis out of the house, down the steps, and across the road to Willis Ingledew's General Store. The storekeeper (who was also postmaster of Stay More that year) was in his customary captain's chair facing the large potbellied stove whose stovepipe rose three floors straight up to the roof as the centerpiece surrounded by the balcony of the second floor, where the clothing and shoe departments were. There were a dozen other men sitting in chairs or on bulging wooden kegs within the radius of the stove's warmth. Two of these men faced each other across a cracker barrel atop which a checkerboard had been placed, but the men, Viridis noticed at once, were playing chess, not checkers.

One by one the men looked away from the stove or from the chessplayers and took notice of the two ladies who had entered the store. One by one the men's jaws dropped open.

"How be ye, boys?" the old woman said. The response, she later explained with a light laugh to Viridis, was exceptional: it was customary for a man greeting a woman simply to touch the brim of his hat, or perhaps just to raise his hand in the direction of the brim, or, at the very most, to grasp the crown of the hat and gently raise it before setting it back down. Each one of these men whipped his hat entirely off his head and held it to his heart, and some of them even stood up. Holding their hats thus, they chorused, each and severally, "Howdy do, ladies," and "Fine mornin, ma'ams."

The storekeeper, Willis, standing up, was nearly as tall as Nail. "I'll be jimjohned," he exclaimed, looking at Viridis. "You sh.o.r.e guv me a turn. I thought fer a secont thar ye were Grammaw. Don't she put ye in mind of Grammaw, Paw?" he said to one of the seated men, a very old man who simply nodded and didn't take his eyes off her.

"This here gal is Miss Verdus Monday," the old woman said, in a thick approximation of the local speech. "She hails from Little Rock, and come all the way here jist to see what she can see about Nail Chism's trouble. She thinks he's blameless. Don't ye, gal?"

Viridis had never before in her life been called upon to speak in front of a group, especially not a males-only enclave of general-store loungers. At first she could only nod in response to the question, but then she found enough voice to add, "Yes, and I hope all of you do too." She looked around at them, one by one. Each man was nodding his head.

"Willis, have ye still got that phaeton yore grampaw was so partial to?" the old woman asked the storekeeper, and when he nodded, she said, "We'd be obleeged to ye iffen ye'd hitch her up so's this gal could git up towards the Chism place."

"I'll carry ye myself, ma'am," Willis offered.

But the old woman said, "No need of that, Willis. Jist hitch it up to two of yore best hosses and bring it around."

As Willis exited through the rear of the store toward his livery barn, one of the others said to the women, "Don't ye gals be rus.h.i.+n off. Stay more and pull ye up some cheers or kaigs."

"Yeah," invited another man, "lift yore hats and rest yore wraps."

"She'll be back directly, I reckon," the old woman said. "Won't ye, gal?"

"I'd like to talk with each one of you about Nail," Viridis said.

"Sh.o.r.e thang," they spoke or grunted a.s.sent: "Any old time." "You bet." "Come back when ye can visit more."

Outside, the old woman indicated the phaeton that Willis was bringing into the road and asked Viridis, "Ever driven one of these? I'd go with you, but I think you'd feel more comfortable on your own, wouldn't you, now? Look, you turn right at Jerram's corner up there and you're on the Right p.r.o.ng Road. Stay on it eastward without turning off to the left or right until you've reached the top of that mountain yonder. You'll see the Chisms' house on a cleared knoll set back from the road a ways on your left. Nancy Chism is going to be tickled to see you. So will they all. If I don't see you at bedtime, I'll know they talked you into staying. But come back when you can."

"I don't know how to thank you," Viridis admitted.

"You'll thank me enough with the pleasure of your company," the lady said.

Viridis drove the two-horse phaeton without any trouble, although she'd never driven one before. She drove in the direction she had ridden Rosabone the night before, up between the clinics of the two doctors, past the stone bank building, right at Jerram's store, which would become mine, right on the road I live on but not turning to the left on the Bournes' trail. I wasn't there anyway that morning. I was in school, across the creek, the other way. All oblivious to her driving the fine phaeton of Governor Ingledew right past my turnoff, I was standing at my desk reciting for Mr. Perry a poem from our reader, William Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray: Or, Solitude." It is about a lonesome young girl who gets sent on an errand in a winter storm and disappears, and it always brought a tear to my eye, especially when they traced her footprints in the snow as far as the middle of the bridge, and then no more.

-Yet some maintain that to this day She is a living child; That you may see sweet Lucy Gray Upon the lonesome wild.

O'er rough and smooth she trips along, And never looks behind; And sings a solitary song That whistles in the wind.

I never thought that "behind" could rhyme with "wind"; you'd have to change the way you say one or the other, and I didn't, as I read it, and Mr. Perry didn't correct me, and the way I p.r.o.nounced "wind" was lost anyway beneath the sound of a sob from Dorinda, who then commenced another one of the crying jags she had all the time these days. As I said before, she no longer shared my desk; she had been moved, first down to where the third-graders sat, but then Mr. Perry had completely lost patience with her and had her sit over to one side of the first-graders, big enough to be their mother but too big to share a desk with any of them, so she was just sitting on the stool that Mr. Perry sometimes used for the dunce's corner and had to borrow from her when he needed to make somebody sit on it there, and of course there were jokes about her being our permanent dunce, with or without the corner. Whether or not she was dumb enough to be with the first-graders was questionable, but she certainly cried more than any of them ever did. The least little thing would set her off, and I should have known when I read "Lucy Gray" that it was going to give her a real fit of weeping. If only she knew that the lady who was going to save her soul was on her way up to the Chism place!

Up on the lilting mountain far above the village is a farmplace so old the trees still sing of it. There is a pretty trail rising from the village of Stay More to the farmplace; the trail meanders all over creation before it gets up there, and from places along it you can see forever across the hollers and the hills. The trees singing their fool heads off were a fat maple whose name I wish I knew and a gangling walnut I'd have to call a lady's name were I to dub it, neither of them with even a leftover brown leaf from last autumn, although their buds were swelling and the only green in sight, save the copse of cedars and the first sign of new gra.s.s, were the nests of mistletoe in the upper limbs of the maple, mistletoe a shade of green that you only see in winter, winter's green, which has a special song of its own. I wish Viridis could have heard these trees a-yodeling like crazy as she drove into sight of them, and maybe she did, for all I know. I don't know everything about this story.

I know how Nancy Nail Chism had been listening, not to her trees a-warbling but to the coffeepot a-rattling on the stove, sometime before: a sure sign that company was coming. While she was drying the breakfast dishes, she had dropped the towel, and that means a stranger will arrive very soon; she watched to see if she'd drop it a second time, which means the stranger will be hungry and need something to eat, but she didn't. Seth Chism had dropped his case knife while he was eating: that was proof the stranger coming would be a female; if he'd dropped his fork, it would have been a man on his way up the mountain. "Seth!" she'd said to him when he helped himself to some more of the elderberry jam even though he already had some on his plate; if you absent-mindedly help yourself to something you've already got on your plate, it means the stranger coming will be hungry for the same thing. While she'd drunk her own coffee, Nancy had paid close attention to the cup and noticed that coffee grounds were clinging to the sides of it, which was a sign that the visitor would be bringing good news. Also, her left eye was itching; if her right eye had started itching, it would have meant that the visitor had bad news.

So even before Viridis drove into sight, Nancy knew this much about her: she was a woman, and she was coming to visit, and she would want some elderberry jam, and she would bring good news. Thus the only thing surprising when Viridis came driving up into the Chisms' yard was that she was driving old Jake Ingledew's phaeton and was wearing old Sarey Ingledew's visiting-clothes. Nancy's first thought was that the lady had the wrong house, but all those signs couldn't have been so far wrong. So Nancy went ahead and declared, "Howdy. We've been lookin fer ye."

Had Nail got word to them? Viridis wondered. She saw at once how Nail resembled his mother: Nancy had given him not just his eyes but his eyebrows, his long nose with its strongly shaped end, and his full mouth. Nancy was in good health, and it was almost like seeing Nail the way he ought to be.