The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [169]
At the station he drew her apart from Dorinda for a moment to ask, “You got all the money you need?”
What kind of question was that? For several years now, since her return from Europe, she had not been required to depend upon her father for any assistance beyond a place to live. “Enough,” she said.
“Never can tell what emergencies might come up,” he said. “My daddy always told me, you never know when you might meet some fellow selling two elephants for a nickel.”
She remembered Tom Fletcher’s old jokes about elephants in the Ozarks. This time Tom Fletcher hadn’t made any jokes, except one, of sorts: if she ever wanted to write a column called “An Arkansawyer in Stay More,” he had told her, he would pay their usual rate for it. When she had only smiled, not laughed, he had prompted, “It’s nearly as remote as Yokohama to me.” She had told him he ought to visit her there sometime.
She told her father, “Thank you, Daddy, I’ve got all I need.”
“Just never can tell,” he said. “Here,” and he thrust a roll of bills into her hand. “Put this in your purse and forget about it until you need it.” She tried to protest, but he touched his finger to her lips. “Better take it now instead of having to ask me for it later, when I might be in a bad mood.”
He had a point there. She put the thick roll of bills into her purse. “You’re sweet,” she said.
“I hope you’ll remember me that way,” he requested. And he had one other request: “Cyrilla wanted me to ask you, she said she couldn’t ask you herself, but if it’s okay with you and you don’t think you’ll need it anymore, can she have that studio of yours up in the north tower?”
Viridis raised her eyebrows. “Does she want to take up art?”
“Sewing. She wants me to buy her a sewing machine.”
Viridis smiled. “None of y’all expect me to come back, do you?”
“From the looks of it, no,” her father said, and then he moved back to where Dorinda stood, to tell the girl that he had enjoyed having her stay at his house and was sorry they hadn’t got better acquainted. He wished her a pleasant trip and good luck and a long and happy life.
“BOART!” hollered the conductor, and the three said their good-byes and exchanged hugs.
Viridis Monday left Little Rock.
Take any day in June in Stay More. School’s been out awhile, Mr. Perry the schoolteacher has left town to find a summer job in Harrison, the crops have been planted and are growing, nothing is ready to harvest yet except the snap beans and first spinach, nobody is really busy except the men cutting the hay and the timberjacks who keep on logging into ever more remote stands of the white oak forests.
My father never lost a chance to tell us girls that when school let out he expected us to help more on the farm, but every year school let out and he couldn’t seem to find enough to keep us busy. He complained to Ma and anybody else who would listen that if he’d only had him just one boy to help around the place, instead of all three of us worthless girls, he might be able to turn the farm into a cash proposition. As it was, he could only raise enough to feed us. We weren’t starving, not by any means, but we never had any cash money.
As the youngest of the three unwanted girls, I felt least wanted, so I tried hardest to help out around the place. While Barb and Mandy wouldn’t have been caught dead doing a lick of work outside the walls of the house itself, I got myself the job of tending the garden patch. I wouldn’t let a weed grow loose in that garden patch, and I spent a good bit of my summer out there in the broiling sun, underneath my sunbonnet but my dress all soaked through with sweat. I was pretty young when I discovered something important about the way the brain works: your thoughts are always better, more interesting, more lively, while you’re working than while you’re just sitting. I knew that the worst