The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [70]
“I had some very unpleasant encounters with Judge Sull Jerram. I’ll tell you about it. I’ve got so many things to tell you, but for now our time has run out.”
“Hell,” Nail said. “They ought to give us thirty minutes, on account of I didn’t get any visit time during January. I’m owed twice as much, aren’t I?”
“You certainly are,” she said. “But I can have only half of it. I’ve talked to Mr. Fancher—the one you call Short Leg—and he says that you can have another fifteen minutes for the time you didn’t have in January.” She smiled. “But not with me. There’s someone else here waiting to see you. I’ve got to go. I’ll be your first visitor for March. Good-bye for now, Nail. Take care, and promise me you’ll try to eat whatever they give you.”
“Who—? What—? Hey!” Nail protested, but before he could say anything else, she got herself out of there. In the anteroom she gave a sigh both of relief at getting out on time, in fifteen minutes, and of disappointment at not having been able to talk to him more.
Then she turned to the bench where the girl was sitting. “All right, Dorinda,” she said. “You be a good girl and get yourself on in there.”
Off
Off she had gone to Stay More, in the middle of the winter, and we had met. To me, at first, she had been simply that stranger-lady everybody was already talking about so much that the gossip reached me before she did. The first I had ever heard of Viridis Monday was Bertha Kimber telling my mother, “Ay-law, Fannie, they’s a womarn a-stayin down to the Ingledew big house and done rid her mare plumb from Little Rock!”
But Viridis did not ride the mare all the way from Little Rock, which would have taken forever even if she and the horse both had not frozen to death. No, she put the mare on a train, and they rode the train for most of the way, and she rode the mare only the last sixty miles or so of the trip…but that is getting ahead of the story.
Tom Fletcher did not want her to do it. The Gazette’s managing editor tried not just once but on several occasions through December and January to dissuade Viridis from making the trip. When it became obvious to him that she would not be discouraged by the weather reports, deterred by horrendous descriptions of the Newton County terrain and roads (or lack of them), daunted by the obvious futility of the mission (Fletcher himself, he later confessed to her, had done some checking and sent a couple of seasoned statehouse reporters out to gather the facts and determine that Nail Chism was guilty, and that unless and until Arkansas joined the other states that had abolished the death penalty for rape there was not going to be any way to get the sentence commuted), diverted by a more interesting assignment (he offered to let her cover the legislature’s debate on whether or not Arkansas would go totally dry)—only then did he attempt to kid her out of the “mission” by making it seem an adventure into terra incognita: She would need, he said, to hire some guides, and an interpreter, and a band of bearers. She would need an English-Ozarkian dictionary and phrasebook. She would have to get herself a raccoon coat and a coonskin cap and carry an elephant gun. As a joke, Tom Fletcher had the boys down in the pressroom print up a mock article, “Elephants in the Ozarks,” which he left on her desk.
When it became clear to him (and he was a wise man as well as a practical joker) that nothing would stop her from going to Stay More, he called her to his desk and sat her down and apologized for having belittled her plan, and announced that he had given it some serious thought and decided not only to let her go but to take her himself. If she could just wait until early March when it warmed up a bit, he could get a few days off and borrow a Columbia touring car, which would get the two of them up there and back to Little Rock in no time. He had checked the route as far as Jasper, where, he knew, there was a fair hotel called the Buckhorn they could put up at. Separate rooms, of course, he added, and winked.
Viridis liked Tom Fletcher quite