The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [173]
But while I was standing there looking at the house, the door opened and Viridis reappeared, coming out on the porch and smiling at me. “I didn’t mean to walk off from you like that,” she said. “My hostess wants me to ask you if you would have a bite of dinner with us. Will you?”
“Gosh, sure!” was all I could say, and I joined them for dinner in the kitchen of the Jacob Ingledew house. I had never been inside of that house, and I was thrilled. Oh, in the years since then I’ve seen some finer houses in other places, and looking back I have to think that my world was awfully small that I would consider that house such a palace, when, by comparison with any good city house, it was just a country shack. But to me, then, going inside that house was like stepping into another world.
And both women treated me not as some child eavesdropping on their grown-up conversation but as an equal, almost. I was drawn into their talk as if I really was grown up and had something worth saying and worth listening to. The only times I felt a little left out were when the old woman and Viridis would refer to what had apparently been a lengthy correspondence between them, longer and more continuous than mine with Viridis, One of them would say, “As I mentioned in my last letter…” or “You’ll recall when I wrote to you in early April…” or “But you said to me in your letter of May 15th…” and I couldn’t help feeling a little jealous. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt I ought to consider myself privileged that such an intelligent and beautiful and heroic woman as Viridis would have bothered to write to me at all, let alone as often and as lengthily as she had. And I got a chance, too, to throw in a couple of expressions like “Remember what you said to me in that letter about…?”
We talked for most of the afternoon, and I suppose Rouser got tired of waiting for me to come back out of the house, and he went on home by himself. Finally Viridis looked back and forth between the old woman and me and asked the question that she had been putting off. “You don’t suppose he might actually have come back but is hiding and doesn’t want anybody to know he’s here?”
I thought it was a kind of desperate question, as if she couldn’t quite face the possibility that something had happened to keep him from coming home. After all, terrible as it was to contemplate, he could have drowned in the Arkansas River. Or he could have been recaptured, and we wouldn’t know about it until the next week’s issue of the Jasper newspaper. Or he could have changed his mind about coming home and gone to Colorado.
“Aw,” I said. “If he was home, he’d of told his folks he was here.”
“But what if,” she asked, “what if he’d made them promise not to tell anyone else?”
That was possible, I considered. But I protested, “Waymon wouldn’t have lied to you like that.”
“With all of those people standing around?” Viridis said. “Maybe he couldn’t take any chances that somebody he didn’t want to hear it would hear it? Maybe he’s waiting until he can tell me in private?”
The more she talked in that vein, the more desperate she sounded, so I wasn’t surprised when finally she declared that she wanted to ride Rosabone up to the Chism place for a private talk with the Chisms. She changed from her dress into her jodhpurs and saddled Rosabone and rode off, telling me she’d stop by my house on her way back to the village.
But she didn’t, although I waited up past