The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [172]
I let out a yell. Everybody turned to stare at me briefly before returning their gazes toward the distantly approaching wagon. To the few who continued staring at me, I explained my outburst: “It’s Viridis. She’s here.” Then I started running toward the wagon. I was barefoot, as I always am when the weather’s warm, and the gravels of the road bit into my pounding feet, but I scarcely noticed. Rouser chased after me and commenced barking. Other dogs picked up his cry.
So there was a great hubbub as Viridis returned to Stay More. As soon as I started running, others followed me, not all of them running but moving as fast as they could to keep up with me. We didn’t give the wagon a chance to arrive and stop at its destination, whatever its destination was: I still don’t know whether Viridis had told the driver she wanted to go to Ingledew’s store, the old woman’s house, my house, or the Chisms’, or the Whitters’, or where. We stopped her right there in the road. Rindy jumped down from the wagon like she expected a big hug from all of us at once, but it was Viridis I hugged first, and then I hugged Rindy, and the way other people were hugging Viridis, she might have been kinfolks and long lost…or at least the heroine that all of us knew her to be.
Women were exclaiming, “Did ye ever!” and “I swan!” and “Lawsy sakes!” and men were saying, “I’ll be a son of a gun!” and “Wal, dog my cats!” and “What d’ye know about that!”
Then all the commotion ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and it was absolutely silent for a time, so quiet you could hear the trees behind Willis’ store whispering. Waymon Chism broke the silence by declaring, “He aint showed up yit.” We all knew who “he” was.
Viridis had been smiling that great smile that made her mouth look so pretty, but now she frowned and bit her lip. Then she said, “Well.” That’s all that was said for a while by anybody, although they were all looking at one another and exchanging expressions. Then Viridis declared, “We’ll just have to wait for him, won’t we?” In response there was a chorus of men’s and women’s declarations: “He’ll turn up” and “Give him time” and “Any day now” and “Shore as shootin” and “You bet ye” and “Shore thang.”
Then came a dozen different offers from a dozen different women, my mother included, for Viridis to stay with them. They were all disappointed that she had already promised to stay, for the time being, at least tonight, with the old woman who lived in the Jacob Ingledew house right yonder. Men fought each other for the privilege of carrying her luggage to that house. Viridis paid the driver, a young man, or just a teenager actually, and thanked him for bringing them all that distance from Pettigrew.
As it turned out, the young driver, whose name was Virgil Tuttle, did not intend to turn around and head back to Pettigrew, not right away. It had taken them a night on the road to cover the distance (they had put up at a sort of hotel in Sidehill), and during the long trip and that night Dorinda had become real friendly with Virgil, or just Virge as she called him, and now he accepted her invitation to stay at least tonight, and maybe longer, at the Whitter cabin, where, before sleeping with two or more of Rindy’s brothers, he might be permitted to “sit up” with her. She was sweet on him, and I could see why: he was sightly and strong, and he could talk the hind foot off a mule.
He drove Rindy and her new suitcase on toward her house, with her mother riding in the back of the wagon to chaperone them, and I hung back to watch Viridis and the old