The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [181]
“You honestly don’t know?” he said.
“He could be dead for all I know!” she said, admitting it to herself now at last, and began to cry.
The judge was uncomfortable, and he stood up and prepared to leave. “Well, if he shows up, I jist want you to know that it would be greatly to his advantage, and yourn, if you’uns would jist let me have a few words with him before he does anything rash.”
Because Viridis could not reply, the old woman spoke for her: “We’ll tell him what you said.”
In the last days of June, Stay More eases into the slow rhythm that will stay with it throughout July and into August: just enough rain, not very often, to settle the dust and keep things green; just enough work to keep everybody from being idle but not enough to keep them from enjoying what summer was mainly meant for: the casual contemplation of the inexorable passage of time. Summer is a season for endurance and abidance. It is too hot to enjoy life but too green not to. And green is cool. The color alone sustained us, and was all around us, in every conceivable tint and hue.
The men sat on the storeporch and tried to make grist for conversation out of Viridis’ occasional comings and goings and whether or not there would ever be another coming of Nail. After a while it seemed that even that grist was depleted, and nobody spoke of Viridis or Nail, either one. Even the two deputies spying from Tilbert Jerram’s store seemed to be bored and at loose ends, and one of them, at least, got up his nerve to come down to Ingledew’s store and sit with the other men and whittle and chew and spit and hem and haw and cough and spit and whittle and kick the dog off the porch and watch what there was of the world go by. The deputy allowed as how he sure would like to get on back home. None of the Stay More men asked him why he didn’t just do that; they knew he had a paid job of work he was required to do, whatever it was, keeping an eye on that lady, and he’d just have to do it until Sheriff Snow or whoever told him he could quit.
The deputies gave up trying to follow Viridis to her destination on her daily rides. They didn’t have to apologize to anybody that their horses weren’t made for jumping the way Rosabone was. They had seen that mare jump clear across Banty Creek at a spot where it must have been all of twenty feet from one side to the other. Now, did you ever know ary horse or mare hereabouts to do a thing like that? No, it was no use trying to find out where that lady went. If Nail actually had come back and was hiding out wherever the lady went, there just wasn’t going to be any way to find him.
But I knew he hadn’t come back, even if Viridis hadn’t kept me informed on her progress, or lack of it. Every day I observed the mullein stalk still bent down when I went to my own little waterfall to take a bath after working in the garden. Rouser always went with me, but, like I say, I carried my .22 rifle as an extra precaution, and also in case I saw a fat squirrel or a partridge that was ripe for the pot. Sometimes I hit one, and we had a little variety on the table to replace the pork that was usually our only relief from a diet of greens: with every meal except breakfast, we had spinach, turnip tops, wild poke, lamb’s quarters, or some other wild green. I’ve always been fond of greens, cooked not too long if I could get Ma to move the pot off the stove before they cooked brown, but even the best mess of greens got tiresome by itself and was greatly improved by the little bit of fresh critter I sometimes shot.
Seth Chism took a turn for the worse. Nowadays, if he were still living, he’d be rushed in an ambulance to the hospital and put in the ICU, but back then nobody’d ever heard of an ambulance, and although there was a kind of hospital up at Harrison, thirty miles off, it was an all-day ride on a road so bad it’d kill you if your disease didn’t, and once you got there the bed wasn’t any different from what you had at home. So Seth Chism lay dying in his own bed, and all Doc Swain could do was send Waymon Chism