The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [179]
“Mine is bound to fail too,” she said.
Doc Swain, who wasn’t any older than she was, looked at her with compassion. “It better not,” he said gently. “There aint nothin I could give ye for your heart.”
The old woman had a visitor that night. Or maybe he meant to visit Viridis, but the way he acted, it was the old woman he had driven all the way from Jasper to see. Judge Lincoln Villines drove the car himself, and he came alone. He must have left early in the afternoon, to drive that car over all the ridges and through all the creeks between Jasper and Stay More. He arrived just a bit too late for supper. The old woman and Viridis were taking their coffee out on the porch when he pulled into the yard. Of course they recognized him from the previous time he’d been on that porch: it was almost as if those five or six months had not intervened since he had last stood there in the company of the sheriff and the county judge; it was almost as if they could still hear him snapping at the latter, “Shut yore fool mouth, Sull! Aint you done made enough trouble already? Jist shut up, afore ye go and make it worse!”
But now he spoke mildly, although the subject of his speaking had not changed: “Ladies, good evenin and howdy. I trust ye aint had no trouble lately from…my colleague, Jedge Jerram?”
“He knows better than to show himself in my sight again,” the old woman said.
Lincoln Villines smiled at her and waited to see if she would offer him a chair. She did not. He turned to Viridis. “And you, young lady? Has he given you ary bad time?”
“Not directly,” Viridis said. “I haven’t seen him. But his deputies are trying to stalk every move I make.”
The circuit judge smiled. “Them is Sherf Snow’s deppities, ma’am. They don’t work for Sull.”
“Does it matter?” Viridis said testily. “Aren’t all of you in cahoots together?”
The judge coughed. “That aint a pretty color to put on it,” he said. “I don’t have no sympathy nor friendship with the sherf. And I don’t have no feller-feelin with Sull Jerram neither.”
“You’re both judges,” Viridis pointed out.
“He aint no judicial jedge, ma’am. Don’t ye know that? He’s jist a administrative jedge.” Villines turned to the old woman. “Iffen ye’d be so kind as to offer me a cheer, I’d set and explain the difference to y’uns.”
“We know the difference,” the old woman said. “But pull you up a cheer and set, if you’ve a mind to.”
He sat. He rubbed his hands together as if washing them. He started to spit over the porch rail but decided not to. “Fairly cool for this time of June, aint it?” he observed, but neither of the women commented. Then he said, “No, I’m sorry to say it, but Sull Jerram don’t know beans about law. Iffen he’d of knowed the first thing about the law, none of this mess would have started nohow.” When that brought no comment either, he addressed a conversational question to Viridis: “How’s ever little thing at the Gazette and all, these days?”
“I’m no longer with the Gazette,” Viridis informed him.
“Is that a fack?” he said. “Wal, I do declare. Times change, don’t they. You aint a reporter no more?”
“I never was a reporter,” she said. “Just an illustrator.”
“I see,” he said, uncertainly. “George Hays told me you was a reporter.”
“There are many things that Governor Hays does not understand.”
“Wal, I don’t make no promises, but I do believe that if I was to be elected governor, I couldn’t do no better.”
Both women attempted to figure that one out. They looked at each other. Had Lincoln Villines just intimated that he intended to run for governor, or hadn’t he? Viridis had heard the rumors, that the so-called Jeff Davis faction of the Democratic Party, named after a demagogue who had served as governor early in the century, was touting Lincoln Villines as their likely candidate in the event