The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [150]
He had pretty much made up his mind to go to Colorado when he broke out. Then he got a letter from me. Much, much later I learned that it was one of the few letters they had let him read, uncensored, in the original envelope. I have promised not to put myself into this story any more than is absolutely necessary, but I have the feeling my letter may have changed Nail’s mind about going to Colorado.
Dear Nail,
Viridis told me I should write to you. She writes to me all the time and tells me everything that is happening, or not happening, to you. And then I tell everybody else in Stay More. It makes me feel important to stand around on the porch of Ingledew’s store and tell everybody the news about you. You know, the Jasper newspaper doesn’t say much, and that’s because I guess Judge Jerram and them still run everything in Jasper. But that is changing. Which is what I’m writing to you about now.
Judge Jerram likes to sit on his brother Tilbert’s storeporch as if he was still somebody important around here, but there is not one of us does not despise him and sneer at him and even his brother Tilbert does not like him because he’s bad for business, Tilbert says to anybody who will listen. There’s room on Tilbert’s storeporch for Sull and Sheriff Snow and a deputy or two, and that’s all, because nobody else will bother with them.
Your brother Waymon is not the least bit afraid of those fellows.
He will go right up to the edge of the porch, and turn his back to Sull and say over his shoulder, “You want to shoot me in the back again?” and Sheriff Snow will tell him to go away or he will arrest him for loitering, and Waymon will say, “It sure looks to me like you fellows are the ones who are loitering.”
And they know they wouldn’t dare try and arrest Waymon or they wouldn’t be able to take him out of Stay More and put him in the Jasper jail. Your brother is fine and strong. I am sorry about your father, but I guess you know his health has not been good for some time. Your mother and Irene and Luther and all are just fine.
They all miss you, as does every one of us. I think your land misses you too. Yesterday I took me a long hike up through your sheep pastures. The weeds have taken over pretty bad. There’s brambles too. From a distance those pastures are all pretty and green, and rolling, you know, and it’s all so nice and peaceful up there, but when you try to walk through it, it’s overgrown and lonely. The trees sort of sigh.
There’s this one place, way up against the corner of your upper forty, where the two tree lines sort of converge at the edges of the pasture on what looks like a dead corner up against the mountainside, and is a real dark shade of green, like the mouth of a cave, and you feel sucked into it, or drawn up thataway, and when you get into it you see there’s an old road there, just a trail, if you know the spot I mean, and if you follow that trail up through the woods for quite a ways, a mile or more, with the woods growing deeper and darker, you come to this glade where a waterfall comes down off the very top of the mountain, as if it was gushing up out of some powerful spring up there. The glade is sunny, with the sun shining right on the waterfall, but it’s dark all around, and dark in these several sort of half-caves where it looks like Indians must have lived. It was kind of scary, and I didn’t stay up there very long, but while I was there I thought of you, a lot, and I had a strange vision as if I could see you just living and dwelling in that hidden glade.
Of course I’ve had to look up some of these words in my dictionary to spell them right, and some of them to find out just what they mean or how they came to mean what they did, and I have to tell you that