The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [68]
Not that he ever got summoned to the visit room. As February drew to its foreshortened close, he consciously prevented thoughts of the visit room from ever again torturing him. Some men in prison are capable of such self-control of their minds; they are able to put themselves to sleep at night or to resume sleep after springing awake in the middle of a nightmare by preventing their minds from thinking too much, or thinking about the wrong things. The visit room was a wrong thought, and Nail succeeded at last in abolishing it entirely from his consciousness.
Thus he was totally surprised one morning in late February when Short Leg came to his bunk, kicked his foot to draw his attention, and held out the handcuffs. “Visit room, Chism. There’s a lady waiting to see you.”
On
He looked terrible. His hair was growing back in uneven patches, which were white as well as blond, reminding her of dustings of snow on the Stay More hillsides beneath the dark branches of trees. But his head was still splendid compared with his body, which looked starved and emaciated. He was smiling at her as if he’d never been happier in his life, but his body looked as if it had already died. She held out her hands to the screen that separated them, a screen so fine that she could not even get her fingertips through it to touch him. He put his hands up to hers, and although their hands did not touch, it was almost as if they were in contact. The guard motioned with the end of his shotgun barrel for them to remove their hands from the screen. Dropping her hands, she found her voice: “Hello, Nail.” It did not cause her any discomfort to address him familiarly; she felt she knew him very well; indeed, she now knew many things about him that he probably did not know himself.
“Howdy, Miss M—” He started to address her formally but then asked, politely, as if making an important request, “What can I call ye?” And then suggested an answer: “Do you want me to call ye Viridis?” She nodded. “I’ve been lookin for ye,” he said in a way that told her he had been counting the hours waiting for her.
“I’ve done a bit of traveling,” she said. “I’ve been to your Stay More and back. It took me a while.”
“On a horse?” he asked, grinning.
She nodded. “A mare, actually. Named Rosabone.”
“You rode Rosabone all the way to Stay More?”
“No, we took the train as far as Clarksville.”
“‘We’? Oh, you mean you and the mare?”
She nodded. He laughed. She declared, “Stay More is a beautiful place. A fabulous place.”
“This time of year?” He raised his heavy eyebrows, which were the only good hair he had remaining on his head. “Swains Creek must be froze.”
“Banty Creek is iced over, but not Swains Creek.”
“You went up Banty Creek?”
“I went everywhere.”
“Even my—even the Chism place?”
“Especially the Chism place.”
“You met my momma?”
“I had some long talks with your mother.”
“And Paw—how is he?”
“Middlin to fair.”
Nail chuckled. “‘Middlin to fair,’ huh? Who taught ye that?”
“Who does it sound like?”
“Him. Paw. You said it almost like he was standin right here.”
“He wishes he were. He said to tell you, ‘Boy, don’t ye never fergit, yo’re a Chism, and Chisms don’t never quit.’”
Nail shook his head in wonder. “It’s almost like you brought his voice with ye.”
“I brought all their voices with me.” She looked him closely in the eye, as near as the screen would permit. “And the voices of the trees too. In your front yard, looking out over the whole valley and the next valley over, there are two huge trees. Sockdolager old trees!”
“‘Sockdolager…’” Nail chuckled. “You didn’t hear that one from Paw.”
“No, from Willis Ingledew. But he wasn’t talking about your trees. Nobody called your trees that, except the trees themselves.”
Nail squinted his eyes intently. “They spoke to ye?”
She smiled. “In a manner of speaking. They don’t use our language, of course. And you and I are both crazier than coots.”
Laughing, he said, “Those