The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [219]
He should not need to brood so; she will understand him. She will know him through and through, what makes him tick, what winds him up and makes his pendulum swing, and whether he is midnight or high noon despite his hands being the same at both times. Viridis will almost want to ask him herself, Aren’t you thinking about getting some more sheep? but she will decide to wait, because she will know he is.
And he will start a new flock. Not right then, because late summer isn’t the best time, but soon. Within a year he’ll have his hundred and twenty acres up to capacity with sheep, more than he’s ever had before, and Viridis will set some tongues to wagging because she’ll do something that most wives hereabouts (although she won’t be a wife yet) never do: she’ll help with the stock. She’ll learn the ways of sheep. She’ll become, for heaven’s sake, a shepherdess.
Won’t that be pastoral? I will come across them once, on my rambles. I’ll ramble a lot. The day that Dorinda Whitter elopes with Virge Tuttle and is taken by him back to Pettigrew to live, I’ll go up on the hill to shut down our playhouse. Not just shut it down but destroy it, I guess. Then I’ll keep on walking until I happen to find myself in Nail’s sheep pastures, and I’ll catch sight of them: Nail and Viridis, sitting on the hillside, under a singing hickory, surrounded by grazing sheep. Nail will be playing his harmonica to the hickory’s singing. Viridis will have her sketchbook in her lap, drawing, I’ll suppose, a pastoral landscape.
They will catch sight of me and wave. That ought to be my last picture in this story, the two of them there on that hillside, waving good-bye together, waving to signal that the story is over, that everything’s fine, that I can go my way and they can go theirs, that the sheep will be happy and grazing, that all’ll be right with the world.
But they will also be waving hello as well as good-bye, and I will go on up and visit with them for a little bit. It will bother me to be that close to Nail, and I guess I’ll blush. I’ll still be in love with him. I’ll still have dreams, waking and sleeping, about what it would’ve been like if I’d, that morning with him in the cave, if only I’d…
“Could I see your picture?” I’ll ask Viridis, and she’ll show it to me, the landscape she’s working on. When the time will come that Governor Brough will invite Nail to come to Little Rock and give himself up and receive the governor’s pardon, and Viridis of course will go with him (and the two of them will conspire to get Ernest Bodenhammer a Brough pardon too), she will have a whole bunch of pictures to take with her, not just the very best landscape sketches ready to be framed but a number of canvases too: oil paintings of the Stay More countryside and of the people. She will not by any means be the first to have depicted the village and its inhabitants on canvas, nor by any means will she be the last, but to me she will always be the one whose pictures never fail to capture my eyes and my heart, both.
Viridis Monday will always be the one, and I’ll get through a lot of the rough places of my life just by thinking of her, and wishing I were like her, and trying to be like her, and only sometimes envying her for having taken Nail. I’ll never find a man to save. Not like she saved him. But I’ll keep my eyes open.
Far off, the day before yesterday, I will attend Dorinda Whitter Tuttle’s funeral. My grandson Vernon will drive me the fifty-three miles to Pettigrew for it. Pettigrew, to my sorrow, will be all run down from its former glory as the terminus of the Frisco Railroad, which will have been gone from it for some fifty years. Pettigrew will be just a wide place in the road, both sides of the road clotted with