The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [174]
The next morning I worked for only an hour in the garden before heading for my waterfall to bathe. The mullein stalk named Viridis was standing proud and tall. But the one named Nail still drooped to the ground. I took a real quick shower bath, returned to the house and had a quick breakfast, and was sitting on the front porch of our cabin when Viridis rode up on Rosabone.
“He wasn’t there,” she said.
“I know,” was all I could say. But I did know, from the mullein stalk, that he had not come back to Stay More.
The Chisms of course had been so delighted with her visit that they hadn’t easily let go of her. She’d had to stay with them through supper, and until it was scarcely light enough to see her way home, and by then she had been too tired to remember her promise to stop by my house. She was sorry. I said that was okay, that I was sorry she hadn’t found Nail.
“You don’t suppose,” she started again with those familiar words that sounded sort of desperate, “that he could be somewhere up in the mountains or lost hollows, hiding out?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t break the magic and tell her about that mullein stalk named Nail, or it would pop right up and pretend he wasn’t lost when he actually was.
“You don’t suppose,” she asked, “that he might not even want his own parents to know that he has come back?”
“Viridis,” I said, with a little exasperation, “I know that Nail’s not anywhere around Stay More.”
“How can you be so certain?” she said, not really asking it so much as accusing me for my cocksure conviction.
“I just know,” I declared. “Believe me.” I nearly added, by way of consolation, I’ll tell you the minute I see the mullein straighten up again. But you can’t tell anyone about the mullein.
She said, “Latha, Nail told me that you could tell me where he would be hiding. Do you know where it is? Would you show me?”
Then I remembered what I’d written to him in that letter about the lost glade, or glen, of the high waterfall, way back up on the mountain beyond his upper sheep pasture. I was flattered that my telling him about it would have made him want to use it as a hiding-place. For a moment, even, I wondered if the range of my mullein’s magic extended that far into the wilderness. Could it be that my mullein didn’t know he was already there? But no: the mullein will tell you if something or someone is lost even if it or they are a thousand miles away. “Sure, I could show you,” I said, “but I don’t think you’ll find him there.”
“Can we go there?” she asked, and that note of desperation still gave an edge to her question. She observed, correctly, that I was just sitting in the rocker on the porch, not doing anything, and she asked, “Are you free to go right now?”
I looked around as if somebody might try to detain me, or as if to see if anybody was spying on us, but Viridis and I seemed to have the morning all to ourselves. “Let’s go,” I said.
And we went. Rouser tried to follow and I told him to stay home but Viridis said he could go with us, so we let him trot along after Rosabone as she carried the two of us up the road toward the Chism place.
But somebody was spying on us. I should have guessed, I should have been able to put myself inside of Sull Jerram’s crooked mind and figure out that if he and his courthouse gang were determined to keep Nail from returning, or to capture him as soon as he showed up and turn him back over to the authorities in Little Rock, they’d likely post a watch on Viridis and trail every move she made. By now everyone knew she was here. By now Sheriff Duster Snow had had plenty of time to tell his deputies to put Viridis under surveillance. Two deputies, we later learned, had taken up residence in Tilbert Jerram’s General Store, from which they could watch any