The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [63]
And then you discovered you had enough to spare and you shared it with me. I can accept it from you with gladness and gratefulness because I know you can afford to spend it, which maybe you can’t afford to do on a basket of fruit or a book, not to mention this solid gold gent’s charm you gave me. You won’t misunderstand this either: that I sure do appreciate the gent’s charm, and I do know exactly why it’s a tree, and why you asked them to make it like that, and I will still be wearing it to my grave or old age, whichever comes first, but it bothers me some that it cost you money that maybe you couldn’t afford, the way you can afford to let me have some of that leftover self-respect.
You do not know me. I believe that you are blessed with some kind of ability to look a person in the eye before doing their picture and tell whether that person is good, bad, or not worth shooting. You make better pictures than I ever even drempt was possible to draw. I don’t know you either but I know that you must have seen all kinds of eyes. Clear, squinty, keen, beady, bright, dim, smiling, pink, crossed, hawk, walled, dull, catty, goggled, popped, bug, glared, blinked, squinched, cataracted. Enough of all kinds to be able to look in their eye and tell what demons are afollowing them or what angels are aleading them.
But you don’t know me or any of my life except what they said I done to that girl, which you know I didn’t do. You don’t even know how the way that I was raised and what I come to want to do with my life was such that I couldn’t never even have thought about doing it to her. You don’t know the hills of Stay More, and you don’t know the Ingledews, Duckworths, Bournes, Whitters, Plowrights, Coes, Bullens, Murrisons, Dinsmores, Kimbers, and Swains, and only one Chism, me, and not much of me. Even if you did know ever last one of them, you’d just have the makings of a start on knowing somebody like Sull Jerram, who is waiting at the end of your investigation like a toad sitting on a rock all day long waiting for a butterfly to get within shot of his tongue.
But Sull Jerram is not real Stay More folks, though he was born there. The closest Judge Jerram ever come to being Stay More folks was somehow persuading my nice but not very bright sister Irene into marrying him. She’s my half sister, actually. But I am not even going to start in trying to tell you about all these people. If you want to begin from scratch and try to get to know Stay More, in the dead of winter, or at any time, you would probably enjoy it, even if you never found a shred of proof that I didn’t rape Dorinda Whitter.
She’s not the one you should start with. She’s the so-called victim, and many a time I have told myself that she couldn’t be just playing off that way, that somebody actually must have done it to her. And I think maybe whoever done it to her done it just so the law would believe her when she got up and said what he told her to say.
There is another girl you ought to talk to first, if you are really of a mind to visit Stay More. Her name is Latha Bourne, and she is about the same age as Dorinda, and I reckon you could say they was best friends at one time, maybe still. But she is another one of them females who like yourself is able to be honest enough with herself to have some left over to be honest and kind and smart with other people. If you want to look into a pair of eyes, start with hers.
As for character witnesses, any man, woman or child in Stay More who ever knew me or just saw me out yonder in the pasture with my sheep will likely tell you whatever you need to know. But you should be sure and talk to the fellows that sit on Ingledew’s store porch, except this time of year they won’t be out there on the porch, they’ll be inside sitting around his potbelly stove. And Willis Ingledew himself can tell you I was there on that porch that time they