The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [145]
“Oh, dear,” Viridis said. “Well, that’s too bad.”
“You can just mail him the letter,” Bird suggested. “But I don’t know about that harmonica. They prolly wouldn’t let him keep it, on account of before.”
“I guess I’ll have to say good-bye,” Viridis said. “I can’t say anything else.” Nail saw why she couldn’t say anything else: she had put something into her mouth. Pretending to wipe her lips in preparation for a parting kiss, she put the padlock key into her mouth. Bird wasn’t paying much attention anyway; kissing seemed to make him squirm. They leaned across the table, and again Nail felt the spark of their lips meeting, and wondered if the Rowland book had any explanation for that. Her lips parted, and the key came through them, between his, into his mouth. Suddenly he was aware of a tightening in his pants. He took the key into his mouth and, unable to talk, nodded his head good-bye to her. Later he wished he had thought to tell her he loved her before he got the key in his mouth. He had planned to say so during the meeting but never did.
Ernest came back to the death hole from his fifteen minutes with Viridis more cheerful than Nail had ever seen him. He had got permission from the trusties to pass the new sketchbook across to her, and they had talked about his pastel drawings, which were considerably more complicated than the black-and-whites he had been doing. Viridis had made a few suggestions but mostly had just complimented him, and had said “Ooh” or “Ahh” as she turned the pages, and just made him feel real good watching her eyes and her face as she looked at his work. She had also brought him a basket, with pretty much the same things she’d brought Nail—“enough cookies to choke a horse”—as well as a couple of art books, Advanced Pastel Techniques and Great Drawings of the Masters.
That night Nail went through the basket Viridis had brought him. It was better than Christmas. He ate an apple and wanted to eat a banana too, but he saved it. He chewed some of the chewing-gum. He opened the books; there were three of them: a clean, revised edition of Dr. Hood, big and thick and fancy-bound, with new chapters he hadn’t read before, on things like unhappy marriages and how to avoid them, how to raise children, and so on; there was a new book called Tender Buttons by a lady named Gertrude Stein; and there was a slender little book of poems, called Irradiations: Sand and Spray, by John Gould Fletcher. Nail opened it to the flyleaf and read:
To Nail Chism, a brave Arkansawyer,
whose story will take more pages
than this book.
With ineffable admiration,
John Gould Fletcher
Beneath the fancy ink of that inscription there was written in pencil in Viridis’ hand: “He is the cousin of my ex-boss, and grew up in Little Rock, lives now in London, but has read all the newspaper stories about you, and thinks the world of you.” Beneath that in blacker pencil someone had block-printed: WRITING STUFF IN BOOKS IS AGAINST RULES OF THIS PRISON.
Nail had been required by his teacher at the Stay More school to read poetry, but he hadn’t particularly cared for it or had time for it. Now that he had a lot of time, he read Mr. Fletcher’s verse cover to back, and then back to cover. There weren’t any rhymes in it, and Mr. Fletcher seemed to get overexcited at times, but he had a good way of putting things, and Nail understood what he was saying. There was one long poem, called “Green Symphony,” that was mostly about trees, and Nail appreciated such lines as:
The trees splash the sky with their fingers,
A restless green rout of stars.
and:
The trees lash the sky with their leaves,
Uneasily shaking their dark green manes.
A good poem,