The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [160]
If he could find the sycamore and get that revolver loaded (or maybe she had already loaded it for him), he could shoot those dogs if any of them traced him, and shoot any man who tried to come after them. He plunged onward, and in the dark he could not keep the edge of the swamp clearly in view. He made a misstep and suddenly found himself up to his waist in water. For a moment the shock of the water took his breath away, but then he laughed, because it was the first time he’d been in water since his arrest nearly a year ago. This was his first bath in ages, and he loved deep water. He splashed briefly and then swam hard and fast until he reached the opposite bank of the swamp, and climbed up, and found himself within view of the tall sycamore tree splashing the sky with its fingers, shaking its dark-green mane.
He shook the water from himself; he was wet all over but would soon be in dry clothes. He was concerned that the water might have washed away the mustard oil, but a deep breath told him he still stank of it. He wanted to run up and hug that tree. So he did.
Viridis had told him there was only one tree in the vicinity; this one certainly dominated all the others around it, and at its foot he found the flat rock she had described to him: an ideal place for hiding something. But nothing was underneath it, and his groping did not discover any other flat rock nearby. Nail heard the dogs—running closer, he thought—and the distant voices of men.
Abruptly he remembered that this was Friday night, and Viridis had not planned to hide the cache until Saturday afternoon. If this had been Saturday night, he might not be alive. He was alive, but there was no cache: no canvas bag, no gun, no food, no money. He thought how hard it was going to be without those things that Viridis had meant for him to have. Would all of his planning, and all of hers, come to nothing?
Nail ran on. Or stumbled on; his wet trousers and debilitated condition kept him from running. He had a sense of direction. The sycamore tree was southwest of the penitentiary, but his destination was to the northwest. He veered. As he struggled onward, around the edges of other swamps, through some of them, getting wet again, he kept pressing to his right, turning slightly without, he hoped, starting a great circle that would take him right back where he came from. Eventually he came out on the cement of the Hot Springs highway, one of the first paved roads in that part of the county, and far up it he could see the headlights of automobiles approaching from the penitentiary road.
Quickly he crossed over the road and found himself in a lumberyard, among stack after stack of sawed and kilned boards. He remembered that many of the men in the barracks were sent out to work in this lumberyard and came back to the barracks smelling of the same fresh-cut wood that now surrounded him. He realized that all these boards had recently been trees in the forests, and those trees had died and stopped singing to make these piles of wood. Or maybe they had not stopped singing: maybe these piney, pitchy, turpentiney fragrances were the continuing song of the trees, who never died as long as they could still broadcast their odors. He moved among the stacks, finding himself in a labyrinth of lumber. The butchered trees imprisoned him. He hadn’t helped fell them or cut them, but now they menaced him and would not let him out. He thought of turning back to the highway, but the sound of the automobiles kept him from even turning that way in his frantic threading of the maze. It seemed to take forever to reach the back side of the lumberyard,