The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [171]
Each morning, after two or three sweaty hours in the garden, I would hike up to the waterfall to clean up, and I would pause to notice that both mullein stalks were still bent down. I would greet them and tell them I hoped they would straighten up.
When I had bathed and put on a fresh dress, I would mosey on down into the village and hang around Ingledew’s store at the time of morning when everybody was there to get their mail. I never got any mail, except from Viridis. But she never wrote to tell me exactly when she was coming.
The men would sit on the furniture of Ingledew’s storeporch like it belonged to them. The women and girls would have to stand around, not on the porch but off to one side, or out in the road, or sometimes inside the store around the dry goods, which was an exciting place to be, especially after Willis Ingledew received a new shipment of bolts of cloth, clean and bright and smooth. Nothing smells better than fresh cloth. But while I enjoyed hanging around the dry-goods department, more often I stood outside off the edge of the porch near enough to the men to listen to their stories or their talk about current events. The main current event now was Nail’s escape. How long would it take him to get home? There was no doubt in any man’s mind that he was coming home; there were only two questions: how long did it take a feller to walk from Little Rock to Stay More if he was careful not to let himself get seen? and how soon after coming back to Stay More would Nail do something to Sull Jerram?
Every man was of the opinion that Nail would do something to Sull Jerram. If he didn’t kill him, he’d mutilate him beyond recognition or something equally terrible, and Sull knew it, and the men who’d been to Jasper lately reported that Sull was…I thought they said “scared spitless” and figured they meant he was so frightened he couldn’t work up enough saliva inside his mouth to take a decent spit, because a man in that predicament was practically unmanned. From my observation, every male human being above the age of twelve or thirteen had to be able to spit at least once every fifteen minutes or he risked being mistaken for a female.
I had to watch where I was standing when I eavesdropped on the porch loungers; I had to be ready to jump to one side quickly.
I told nobody about my mullein stalks. You don’t ever tell, which would break the magic. Nobody in Stay More except me, and I suppose the old woman who lived at Jacob Ingledew’s (although her house was directly across the road from Willis’ store, she hardly ever crossed the road; I never saw her), knew that Viridis might return to Stay More any day now.
One morning in late June on my way to the waterfall after working in the garden, I paused to observe the two mullein stalks and noticed that one of them, the one I’d named Viridis, was behaving like a pecker ready for love. I was so excited I could scarcely take time to go on to the falls and take off all my clothes and get real wet. Later, on my way to the store, and at the store itself, I couldn’t understand why all the rest of the world, except that mullein stalk, remained so normal and unexcited. It was a typical dull, slow morning in Stay More. The mail wagon came out from Jasper, and Willis Ingledew sorted the mail, and folks saw what they got and read it, or read it for those who couldn’t read, and I didn’t get anything, but I didn’t need anything, because I knew she was coming!
And sure enough, she came! Mullein stalks are never wrong. That very morning, while we were all still there, in or on or around the Ingledew store, the twenty-odd porch regulars loafing in their chairs or on their kegs and keeping the dust of the road down with their spitting, ankle-deep in the shavings from their pocketknives, the children playing in the road without fear of traffic, for there