The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [64]
I’m not too sure just what that is, tell you the honest truth. My brothers are both real good friends but they’re brothers so maybe that don’t count.
Right now I feel like you are my best friend.
On the back side of this sheet I’ve drawed a sort of map that ought to help you get from Jasper to Stay More (that is the way it is always spelled, not Staymore all one word the way you did it). All the roads thereabouts are hell on autos. But I have to tell you, Viridis Monday, I can’t imagine a lady riding a horse into Stay More. Nobody there has ever heard tell of a cowgirl and their tongues are sure to wag out of their faces.
But come to think on it, let them wag. This time of year they don’t have nothing to talk about anyhow. Just give each and ever one of those Stay More folks that smile of yours, which is I swear the nicest smile I ever saw on any creature except one of my late lamented sheep. Tell everbody I said hello, and give them all my love.
And to you, good lady, there are no words, except:
Your friend,
Nail
P.S. I really can’t use anything myself I don’t already have, but if you’d like to bring something the next time you come or send Mr. Cobb with it, there is a boy here who is a friend of mine and very good at drawing like you and even has hair like yours but he has nothing to draw with excepting a piece of chalk. If you could smuggle one of those drawing pencils like you use and that type of pad. We would appreciate it.
Then he just had to wait for a chance to get the letter out to her via Farrell Cobb. He did not have an envelope, but he kept the pages folded three times and pressed inside his copy of Dr. Hood’s Plain Talks and Common Sense Medical Advisor, where he could get the letter out and slip it to Cobb the next time he showed up.
January came, a new year, 1915, without any observance or notice. The few men who had old calendars ripped them up, and the fewer men who had new calendars brought them out and began to mark off the days. The flyspeck room always had a waiting list of patients suffering frostbite from being sent off to work at the lumber yard or the brickyard or on the Rock Island railroad. Nail was able to walk around pretty well, although he’d lost forty pounds and wouldn’t have known himself if he’d had a mirror to meet himself in, which he didn’t, but he was not able to be sent out to work, even if it was permitted, which it wasn’t. Convicts under sentence of death, according to law, could not be made to work, or even volunteer to work, and he was still under sentence of death although he wore stripes like the other men (condemned men, by the same law, could not be made to wear stripes since it was assumed they would never escape). He could tell by feel that his hair was growing back in; it was just as well he couldn’t see that it was coming back in irregular patches of white and his usual old brownish blond.
He didn’t have a calendar, but he was well enough and sane enough to keep count of the days, and to know that two weeks of January went by before he ever got a chance to “mail” his letter in care of his lawyer. Those two weeks were restless ones. The other men weren’t speaking to him. If his harmonica at Christmas had temporarily thawed the chill of their hatred for a child-molester, it was just as temporary as the thaw in Fat Gabe’s cold blood. Nobody spoke to Nail except Timbo Red.
The boy sensed that Nail was a fellow mountaineer, even without recognizing it in his voice. One morning while marking up the floor with his chalk as Nail watched him, Timbo Red looked up and said, “Do you ’member what a bar looks lak?”
“Why, shore,” Nail said, a bit surprised that someone had spoken to him.
“Could ye draw one fer me?”
Nail laughed. He could see a bear as plain as if one were sitting on the edge of the bunk, but he couldn’t draw a bear, or anything else. “Son, I can just barely draw my name,” he said. “But why