The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [185]
The younger Doc Swain helped the older down from his horse. Both men first said politely to me, “Howdy, Latha,” and then began to examine the corpse. Doc had a notebook with him, and he made some notes and drew a couple of diagrams showing where the body lay in relation to the trees around it, and then he took a sharp stick and traced an outline of Sull’s body in the dirt, and then he and his father lifted the corpse and slung it over the saddle of Sull’s horse like a sack of meal.
We Bournes had never been able to afford Doc Alonzo Swain, and Doc Plowright had always been our doctor, so the older man didn’t know me too well. Now he looked at me, and the first thing he asked was “How old air ye, gal?”
Of course he hadn’t delivered me. A midwife had done it, without even any help from Doc Plowright. “Goin on fourteen,” I said.
“Do ye want me to question ye out yere in these woods, or do ye wanter go have ye a bite of dinner and then come to my office?” He asked this kindly-like, and I appreciated it.
“I don’t keer,” I said. “Might as well do it here.”
“I’ve done et my dinner anyhow,” he announced, “and so’s Colvin. But you ladies mought be hungry.”
I was flattered he called me a lady, without any of the condescension that one hears in “little lady.” “I can hold off eatin till you’re done with your questions,” I declared.
“All righty,” he said, and motioned for us to sit together on a fallen tree trunk. “Well, number one. Would ye have any reason fer killin this man?”
I laughed. “Do you know anybody who wouldn’t?”
“Please jist answer the questions, Miss,” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “I had all kinds of reasons for killin him. He raped my best friend. He sent a good man to prison and nearly to the ’letric chair. He was follerin this lady, Viridis, and Lord knows what he aimed to do to her. Sure, I had all of kinds of reasons for killin him, and I wish I had. I really wish it was me who had done it. But it wasn’t. I didn’t.”
“Who else do you think it might’ve been?” old Doc Swain asked.
“It could’ve been any man…or woman…or child old enough to hold a rifle. Anybody who knew Sull Jerram and knew what he was like and what he done.” I pointed at the old doctor’s chest. “It could’ve just as well been you.”
That didn’t fluster him. He chuckled and glanced at his son and said, “She’s shore right about that. Or you, either one, Colvin.”
“Don’t I know it?” the young Doc Swain admitted. “But ask her whar she got this yere Winchester.” He held up the .22.
“Well?” the older man said to me.
“I bought it from Sears, Roebuck through the mail,” I declared truthfully, and added, “Four dollars and twenty-five cents, plus postage.”
“Whar’d you git the money?” he asked. The question contained an insinuation I didn’t like: the Bournes were too poor to afford Doc Swain, too poor to buy their least daughter a shootin-arn.
“Same place you got yours,” I said. “Honest toil.”
The old doctor grinned, and for a moment I thought he would ask me what kind of honest toil, and I was prepared to answer that one too, but he took up a different line of questioning: “You said that Sull…the deceased…was a-follerin this lady. How do you know he was a-follerin her?”
So I started at the beginning: how I had seen a man on a horse riding after Viridis, and how I had followed them, and everything that had happened, including me tripping and falling and dropping my rifle. “I’ll show you where it was,” I offered, and I led them back through the woods to the place where I had been running, and I pointed out the root that had snagged my foot and sent me flying, and I showed them the pile of old leaves where my gun had landed. The younger Doc Swain measured off the distance from this spot to the spot where Sull Jerram had lain dead.
“Hmm,” said old Doc Swain. “Still and all, you’ve got a empty cartridge in that rifle.”
So I told them about the squirrel too.
“What did ye do with the squirrel?” old Doc Swain asked.
“I put