The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [184]
She gave me a strange look I hadn’t had from her before. “Where’s the squirrel?” she asked.
I attempted to explain. The squirrel, I said, had been killed some time before and was now in a pot on the porch of my house. I hadn’t reloaded the gun but was just carrying it, I guess with that spent cartridge of the bullet that had killed the squirrel still in it. I sure hadn’t shot Sull Jerram with it. Much as I would have liked to. Heck, I didn’t even know it was him until I found him dead. I swear. “Don’t you believe me?” I begged.
“I want to believe you,” she said, and she commenced looking around at the woods on all sides of us. “But who else could it have been? Unless…” She stared so fixedly off into the woods that I thought she must be looking right at him, and I looked in that direction too but didn’t see anyone. “NAIL?” she shouted.
I really hoped he was there. Despite my mullein, which never lies, I hoped he was there, so that he could take the credit, or the blame, for shooting Sull Jerram, and so that we could all live happily ever after. It was time for him to come. But he had not come. The woods were deep-green and silent.
At length she said, “Well, I guess we’ve got to tell somebody about this.”
I offered, “I could run home and fetch Paw’s shovel, and we could just bury him right here and nobody would know about it.”
She gave me that strange look again. “And bury his horse too? No, they’d find him, sooner or later. We’d better report this. Who should I report it to?”
We discussed it and decided that the best person to tell would be Doc Swain. But while we went off to fetch him, we couldn’t just leave the body and the horse to the mercy of wolves or buzzards. One of us would have to stand guard until Doc Swain got here.
“Can you ride Rosabone?” she asked.
“Sure, but she knows you better. You go, and I’ll stay with the body.”
“You won’t be scared?”
“A little, but I can manage.”
“All right, we’ll be back as soon as we can.” She climbed up on Rosabone and turned her to go. “You’ll be here when I get back?” she asked uncertainly.
I nodded, and she was gone. It wouldn’t take her half an hour to run down to the village, and if Doc Swain wasn’t too busy he’d saddle his horse and be back with her within an hour. But it was going to be the longest hour I ever spent. My first thought, when I was alone with the corpse of Sull Jerram, was that whoever had killed him might still be lurking in the woods and take a shot at me. My second thought, as the all-overs began to creep up on me, was that maybe I was the killer and had no one to fear except myself.
Rouser kept me good company and didn’t wander off.
I had never seen a dead body before, much less been all alone with one.
It was worse than being alone in a cemetery at night: at least the bodies there are all covered up so you can’t see them.
I thought of reloading my rifle, for protection, but decided I’d better just leave it the way it was.
I tried what Viridis had tried: I called out, “NAIL?” and heard my voice echoing up in the glen but didn’t get any reply.
If I hadn’t killed Sull, and Nail wasn’t anywhere around, who had done it? Waymon Chism? But Waymon was gone to Harrison, or was supposed to be.
I began to worry about something else, something important: Doc Swain would be discovering these woods, this intended hiding-place, and if he brought the law up here, they might even go farther up the holler and discover the waterfall and the caverns. What good would it be as a hiding-place if everybody knew about it?
Or maybe it wouldn’t ever be needed as a hiding-place. Maybe Nail wasn’t ever going to come.
When that long hour had dragged out to its close, and the morning was long gone, Viridis returned. There were two other men on horses with her, neither of them a sheriff’s deputy. One was Doc Swain. The other was his father, old Alonzo Swain, who, I realized, was still our justice of the peace, as he had been for many years. The older Doc Swain, who had given up his practice to his son Colvin a few years after the son got his medical