The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [202]
As Nail politely declined (three or four times) the man’s invitation to stay the night, the man asked, “Wal, air ye fixin to shoot Jedge Jerram?”
Nail laughed. “I’d shore lak to do it, but all I kin think about right now is gittin myself on up home.”
“Don’t take the right fork yonder,” the man suggested. “That’d take ye down Big Creek towards Mount Judy. Cut back over yon mountain and ye’ll come down to Tarlton. Stay More aint but about twelve, thirteen mile past thar. But you’d best jist come go home with me and stay all night.”
“I’m much obliged,” Nail said, and then, remembering his manners, counteroffered, “Why don’t ye jist go to Stay More with me?”
“Better not, I reckon,” the man said, and let him go, but called out from a distance, “I was you, I’d shore slay Jedge Jerram.”
For the next several miles Nail thought about that. He had been bent, all these days, only upon reaching the hills of Stay More, making contact with his folks, and seeing Viridis without a screen or a table separating them. He had not given much thought to revenge upon Sull Jerram. He hoped he would never even have to encounter the man; if he did, he didn’t intend to start anything; if Sull started something, Nail would be obliged to finish it. Certainly, he hated Sull, but he had not spent much time thinking about murdering him.
As that good day ended, somewhere short of Tarlton, Nail wished he had accepted the man’s offer to spend the night. He knew that the next day promised another attack of chills, fever, and sweats, and he’d have been better off at the man’s house; maybe the man had some quinine or something that Nail could have taken. But it was too late, he was miles past the man’s place, and he needed to find something for supper that would tide him over the bad day, and to find a sheltered place to spend it.
His weakness, his fatigue, his sense of being so close to home that he could almost smell the air of Stay More overwhelmed him, made him giddy, staggered him. Late in the afternoon he found himself, he thought, in a sheep pasture! Real sheep, or at least tangible ones: he called to them, a flock of less than a dozen, “Sheep! sheep! sheepsheepsheep!” and they came to him, and he sank his fingers into their regrowing fleece, although they were skittish, smelling the bearskin he still carried. He inspected them carefully; whoever owned them did not know much about the care of sheep and was not feeding them right or keeping them happy. Nail could not see any near farmstead or signs of a trail leading to one, and if the owner of the sheep had a sheepdog, the dog was busy elsewhere. Nail decided to spend the night with the sheep, and he did. For his supper, he shot a squirrel with the .22 and roasted it over coals. The sheep watched him and sniffed the smoke of his campfire and made puzzled sheep’s-faces.
When the chills seized him the next morning, he attempted to snuggle up against a ewe to keep warm, but she did not understand what he was doing and ran away from him. The bellwether, a castrated ram, led her and the other sheep off down the hill, away from Nail, who could not get up from the ground and follow them. He covered himself with his deerskin and his bearskin and shivered violently for what seemed longer than the usual hour. All day he watched for the sheep to return, but they did not, although he called them again when the sweats had cooled him enough to restore his ability to shout, and eventually he decided that the sheep were only part of his delirium.
Did he get up from the ground and move on? Or was that just another part of his delirium? It seemed to him that he