The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [168]
She was busy trying to get in to see Ernest without written permission from T.D. Yeager, who at that point wouldn’t have given her permission to breathe. On the third day after Nail’s escape, Tom Fletcher “smuggled” her into Ernest’s room as a Gazette reporter, and she was permitted to “interview” the boy for half an hour. He was awake and fairly cheerful, all things considered: all things such as having nearly every bone in his body broken: compound fractures of both arms and one leg, eight broken ribs, six broken fingers, a cracked pelvis, and a dislocated hip. Miraculously, his whole spinal column from neck to tailbone remained undamaged, and he would not be permanently paralyzed, as had been feared at first, although at the moment, and for the next six weeks, he wouldn’t be going anywhere, not even back to the penitentiary.
He enjoyed pretending it was a real interview. “Yeah, quote me as sayin these yere nuns feed me real good; I aint et like this in my whole life.”
“Mr. Bodenhammer,” asked the lady reporter, Viridis, “did Mr. Chism say anything to you about your intended destination?”
“Nome, he never. Tell ye the truth, I never even give it no thought whereabouts I was goin myself. I didn’t aim to light out for Newton County, whar he was a-fixin to go, but I never thought none about goin back home to Stone County neither. I aint got no friends up in them parts.”
“Did he say anything at all to you about his intended route to Newton County? Where and how did he plan to cross the Arkansas River?”
“Ma’am, he never hardly said a thing to me about nothin. I didn’t even know we was breakin out until you—until that there other lady who is his ladyfriend, she told me to be ready. But from the time he come down to git me out of my cell, until we said our good-byes, we never said nothin much atall.”
“I can’t imagine Nail Chism abandoning you like that,” she said.
“Aw, hell, Viridis, I mean, Miss Ma’am, he never abandoned me! I made him do it. I tole him to. It was hopeless, the way I’d done botched up my chance and fell forty feet, a-hittin that pole, and there wasn’t nothin he could do for me. Hell, I had to baig him to save his own skin and leave me alone.”
She put her hand on his cheek, which reporters don’t do. She left it there as she said, “I’m so sorry you didn’t get to go with him.”
“Look at the good side of it,” he said. “I was sposed to die Sat-tidy night, and I’m still alive. People are takin real good keer of me, and I don’t hurt too bad.”
“You won’t be able to draw again for a while,” she observed.
He wiggled the four fingers of his left hand that were not bound in splints or casts. “Didn’t you know I was left-handed?” he said. “I still got some fingers I can draw with.”
“I’ll see to it you get some materials,” she said. “I’ll arrange for you to get all you need to keep on drawing.” She paused. “I’d bring them to you myself, but I…”
He finished it for her, nodding his head to say yes, he knew. “You’re takin off for Newton County,” he said quietly.
She raised her chin into a modest nod. And then she did something that reporters don’t even think of doing: she bent down and kissed him lightly on the mouth.
“You’uns live happy ever after,” he said.
“You too” was all she could say.
Taking leave of her father was not quite as easy: he insisted on going with them to the train station. When she protested, he observed that from the looks of all the luggage she was taking with her, she intended to stay for quite some time.
“I’ll be back,” she said.
“But I doubt she will,” he said, indicating Dorinda. “I’d just appreciate the honor of seeing you two ladies off.”
So he went with them to the station. Viridis had made arrangements to have Rosabone transported on the same train, which would involve