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By Root 2062 0

junked automobiles: a vast junkyard. At least it’s not in Newton County, but over the line in Madison County. Vernon will not stay for the funeral; he will have business in Fayetteville. Rindy’s daughter Latha will have agreed to drive me home afterward; I will be uncomfortable, not so much because Rindy has named her daughter after me and it will be awkward having two Lathas in the same car, as because Latha Tuttle will be seventy years old herself and only a little bit better a driver than me, and I will not be able to drive at all. At least, I will be somewhat relieved to discover that Latha Tuttle at seventy will have no resemblance to myself at seventy. We will not talk an awful lot. She will not be particularly grieving or mournful; she will have been living in Russellville, a widow herself, for many years largely out of touch with her mother, especially in the last years, when Rindy’s body was consumed by cancer. Nor will Latha Tuttle have much interest in the old lady she was named after, and even less interest in the remains of the hometown of that lady. Strangely, it will be her first visit to Stay More and her last. She will be eager to deposit me at my home and get on back to her own. I’ll have time for just one question: “Did your mother ever say anything about Nail Chism to you?” Latha Tuttle will ask me to repeat the name a couple of times; her hearing will be very impaired.

“Was he one of her beaux?” she will ask.

“No, he was a man who was wrongfully sent to the penitentiary because of her.”

“Law, me,” she will say. “You’d think she’d of tole me somethin about that, wouldn’t you? But no, she never said no word about no Nail Chism.”

She’ll shake her head at the mild wonder of it and ask conversationally, “Did he ever git out?”

“He got out,” I’ll tell her.

Now will I even need to say that Doc Swain was right: they will live happy ever after? Do I have to tell the rest of it, let you know whether or not they will actually get married? Or how many children they will have? Or about the times when Viridis will get bored and lonely and restless? Or the bad years that all of us had together? Will I have to mention the droughts and the floods and the fires?

And should I tell how Nail Chism will eventually, with poetic justice, become Newton County’s first electrician? Although by the time poor Newton County finally gets around to being electrified, won’t Nail Chism be too old even to remember the fundamentals of electrical mechanics?

No, I will think back to the picture I began this story with: a red-haired newspaperlady sitting in the death chamber at the state penitentiary and sketching a head-shaved convict waiting to die. The making of that sketch was what started the saving of him, and started this story, and I will let this story end with another sketch by Viridis, which she will show me that afternoon: a dale of green pasture grasses, so many shades of green that even though she has done them all in black and white, I will feel the many greens, the white bodies of the sheep dazzling in their whiteness because of the green that surrounds them, their heads down to eat the green, while a man in a straw hat and blue denim overalls plays his harmonica and watches them, and sitting close beside him a woman draws the whole scene in a sketchbook held in her lap: the man and the sheep and the dale and, out across the dale, far off up on the lilting mountain above the village, a farmplace that is their home, beneath a fat maple and a gangling walnut, both singing. But the woman in the picture will have already finished drawing that: now she adds a final touch, with her kneaded eraser she makes room for the final touch: a girl, not quite yet a woman, walking through the green grass out among the sheep, coming to join the man and the woman, and to be in the picture, forevermore.

About the Author

Donald Harington

Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother’s hometown, where his grandparents