The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [205]
In the mouth of the cavern, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the first thing I saw was the rifle. A .22, lying on top of a big wad of black fur: the skin of a bear, I figured out. Neither the rifle nor the bearskin was among the items that Viridis and I had steadily been furnishing the cavern with. Viridis had considered leaving the Smith & Wesson revolver in the cavern but had decided to keep it with her, for her own protection. She had left no firearm here, or at least she hadn’t told me about any firearm, and she told me virtually everything.
And then I saw him. I knew it was him, and yet I was afraid. Who else could it have been? Since that last time in court I’d nearly forgotten what he looked like, except for his body: no man of my acquaintance, then or after, ever had a body as splendidly put together and held together as Nail Chism did, all the parts of it in perfect shape and accord. The body was sprawled out face up on the bed that Viridis and I had prepared for him. His eyes were closed, and I had to study his chest for a long time to determine that it was slightly moving with his breathing. He was not dead. But he was sound asleep at full day, nine o’clock in the morning. I’d expected to see him in prison clothes, something of which I had only a vague idea, zebra stripes and such, nothing like what he was actually wearing: just a man’s light-blue chambray shirt, some gray cotton trousers, a pair of boots that didn’t look like he’d hiked all the way from Little Rock in them, and a felt fedora hat, fallen upside down behind his head as if he’d dropped to the bed without bothering to take it off.
I resisted the impulse to shake him and see if he would awaken. I sat cross-legged on the floor of the cavern near him and studied him and felt a wild mixture of feelings: exultation that he was home, pride in my mullein stalk for being accurate and straight-up-and-down, admiration for his rugged and battered but beautiful features (the blond hair was growing back rapidly), befuddlement at his deep slumber in broad daylight, and, most of all, growing certainty that he was the one who had killed Sull Jerram. I didn’t understand why my mullein stalk had not announced his return on the same day that Sull Jerram was killed, but the ways of mullein are as mysterious as they are magic and infallible, when they’re not just being ornery.
I had to get Viridis, and yet I could not. First I had to see if he would wake, and let him know that everything was all right and that I would fetch Viridis right away. I wanted to somehow thank him for accepting my suggestion that the glen of the waterfall would make a good hiding-place. I wanted him to know that I’d helped put all of these things in the cavern for him, which, I saw by looking around me, he hadn’t yet used: the cans of corned beef and beans and such were unopened, the pocketknife with can opener attachment untouched, the bar of soap still wrapped, the yards of mosquito netting neatly folded up, the hunting-knife still sheathed. He had not disturbed any of these things…except, I noticed, the harmonica, which now lay on top of the pile of bedclothes, near his open hand, as if he had held it and maybe even played on it but let it drop.
For the rest of the morning I stayed with him, waiting for him to wake. It must have been getting on toward noon. Rouser had wandered off after giving a good long sniff to the bearskin and to Nail’s body. Maybe Rouser had gone back home; he wasn’t all that faithful. I was getting hungry, and thought of opening a can of something to eat, but the sound of the can opener might wake him, so I waited. I felt like an intruder, in a way. I was invading Nail’s privacy, or the privacy of his sleep: in sleep the body does things to us that we don’t know about but wouldn’t want to share with anyone else: in sleep Nail’s most private part distended and bulged mightily within his