The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [201]
Nail presented his bone air to Eddie. Eddie swapped him his dead father’s felt fedora for the coonskin cap.
She walked him as far as the trail and pointed the direction toward Ben Hur.
“I’m shore much obliged,” he said.
“Obliged enough to kiss me?” she asked.
And he took off the hat that had been her husband’s, and he kissed her on the mouth and put the hat back on and did not look back, knowing that she’d not be watching him disappear, because it’s real bad luck and even worse manners to watch somebody go out of sight.
Well, he told himself later on the trail, he wouldn’t never forget where Raspberry was, and if things didn’t work out between him and Viridis, he’d know where to find Mary Jane. Then he smiled and said to himself, But things is bound to work out between me and Viridis.
It was in 1880 that General Lewis (Lew) Wallace published a historical romance called Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which became one of the best-selling novels of all time, and popular even in the Ozarks, where somebody discovered it about 1895 and decided to name a community after it, or, rather, after its title character, a Roman-educated Jew who converts to Christianity and does good deeds. There was no post office of that name until about 1930, when the boundary between Pope and Newton counties was redrawn and Ben Hur became a part of Newton County. As late as 1963, Ben Hur was the last community in Arkansas to receive electricity, and even today the eastern approach to the town remains the last stretch of unpaved state highway in the Ozarks.
When Nail Chism passed through Ben Hur, he did it openly and even waved at a few people he encountered. He could have been taken for a foot traveler on his way to Moore or Tarlton, which is exactly what he was, carrying the deerskin and bearskin folded up under one arm, not wearing them in the heat, and the .22 rifle in the crook of his other arm was no more or less than any traveler might have carried.
He was determined to reach the Newton County line before nightfall, and, while there were no signs along the road indicating the county line, he seemed to know when he had reached his home county: his pace slackened, his step faltered, and he stopped, knowing he had reached the end of the day’s journey: just a little less than nine miles, which, in his weakened condition, had utterly exhausted him. For supper, he had only the fond recollection of his last supper at Mary Jane’s, and then he went to sleep on a pile of leaves beneath a rock shelter in a place called Hideout Hollow.
The next day he awakened once again with severe chills and knew then, conclusively, that he had the “two-day ague,” the form of malaria that recurs every other day. This third attack of the sequence of chills, fever, and sweating did not have the help of the medicine Mary Jane had given him; once again he was immobilized all day, and again he had the hallucination, or delirium, that he had reached Stay More and found a rock shelter in the glen of the waterfall prepared for him by Viridis. But this time when she appeared to him, she berated him for having slept with Mary Jane and told him he might as well go on back to Raspberry. On the next “good” day, in between the recurrent sick days, his first waking thought was that he ought to turn back to Raspberry and just stay there, if not forever at least until he was wholly recovered from the malaria.
But he went on. For the duration of his next good day, he made no attempt to keep hidden in the woods but walked on the cleared wagon trails that connected Ben Hur to Moore, and Moore to Tarlton, and Tarlton to Holt. I calculate that he covered another eleven miles or so along those wagon trails, stopping only once to pass the time of day with an inquisitive driver who was hauling a load of hay from