The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [15]
Finally he disappeared back into the woods. We stayed in the playhouse for a long time, but we were too old for play, and when we left it, we were leaving it for good. Dorinda asked me if I’d come spend the night with her. Sure, I said. “Go ask your mother,” she said. I said she could come with me while I asked my mother. She said no, she’d go on home and do her chores and tell her mother to set out another plate for supper, and for me to just come on whenever I was able.
I went home and told my mother I wanted to spend the night at Dorinda’s. My mother didn’t mind, but I had to slop the hogs and milk the cow before I went. I did, and then I went to Dorinda’s.
The Whitter place was set back up into a hollow on the west side of Ledbetter Mountain: just a two-room log cabin that had a couple of sleeping-lofts and a shed behind the kitchen, which was Dorinda’s room. There were several horses tied to cedar posts in the front yard, and I assumed they were just the riding-beasts of the Whitter boys, but then I remembered the Whitters were too poor to own more than one horse.
One of those horses belonged to Doc Plowright, and he was inside. Another belonged to Hoy Murrison, who was a Stay More sheriff’s deputy, and a third was that of Alonzo Swain, our justice of the peace. While I was there, some other horses arrived, with men on them.
When I said to Mrs. Whitter, “Did Rindy tell ye, I’ve come to stay the night?” she looked at me as if I’d said I was flying off to the moon, and she ignored me while she told the new arrivals, “Doc and Hoy is with her in yonder house.” And the new arrivals climbed the porch and went in. Then she looked back at me, not as if I’d said I was flying off to the moon but as if I had returned from it, and she seemed to recognize me, and said, “Latha, hon, my baby has been ravaged.”
Then she began to cry.
Sheriff Snow sat with me on the edge of the porch. He asked me to tell him what time it was I’d seen her last, and I said I’d just have to guess, it was maybe 4:30 P.M. He asked me to tell him what we’d been doing, and I told him we’d been to our playhouse. He asked where the playhouse was. Dorinda and I had sworn each other to eternal secrecy that we would never tell anyone else about the location of our playhouse, and I couldn’t tell Sheriff Snow. I think I told him, “Up yonderways,” and gestured vaguely toward the east.
“Did you see anybody else up in that vicinity?” he asked, pronouncing it vi-sinitty. There was a man, I said. He was a right far ways off and I couldn’t see him too well, and I didn’t know who he was. “What was he doin?” the sheriff asked. Just standing there, down below, a good ways off, staring toward our playhouse. And then he went away. “You didn’t see him good enough to tell who he was?” the sheriff persisted. I shook my head and shook it again. “You didn’t think it was maybe Nail Chism?” he suggested.
“What makes you think it was Nail Chism?” I wanted to know.
“You let me ast the questions, gal,” he said sternly. “Did you think it could’ve been him?”
It could’ve been, I allowed.
He asked me to tell him my full name and exactly where I lived, and then he said to me, “Do you understand what awful thing was done to thet pore girl?” I nodded my head, uncertainly because I didn’t know if he meant did I know what rape was or did I understand how awful it had been. Sheriff Snow said, “Iffen I was you, and anybody ast me who done it, I’d tell ’em Nail Chism.” I started to protest, but the sheriff said with conviction, “He was the one who done it, no doubt about it. No doubt whatsoever. He’s already confessed. Now you jist tell ’em he’s the one you saw if anybody asts ye. Hear me?”
They wouldn’t let me see her. Doc Plowright gave her something to calm her down and make her sleep, and she slept a long time. I didn’t get to see