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By Root 1978 0

Then Viridis settled down in the passenger car to watch as the train maneuvered the Baring Cross bridge over the Arkansas River into Argenta. The stations they passed, or at which they briefly took on mail or an occasional passenger, on the way to Conway—Amboy, Marché, Wilder, Palarm, Mayflower, Gold Creek—were the same little jerkwaters and whistlestops she’d passed through twice every weekend during her semester’s attendance at Conway Central College and Conservatory of Fine Arts, and the sight of those familiar, almost identical clusters of wooden false-fronted stores and the little railroad depots brought back to her the impoverishment of her collegiate experience. She had come so far since those days, and yet, going back again now, especially as the train pulled in and stopped for a while at Conway, within sight of her old campus, she felt as if she were recapturing something she had lost, or getting another opportunity to do something she had neglected, the first time around.

Conway had really been the limit of her penetration into the Arkansas hinterland, and now, as the train left it and gathered speed to the northwest and the uplands, which she could see already in the distance, she felt that she was going to explore some recesses of her native state that she had not known before. The train followed a generally westward course paralleling the Arkansas River and passing through towns, some of good size, that seemed to have been created by the railroad and had avenues flanking the tracks, and new business buildings: drugstores, hardware stores, furniture stores, even a small theater or two. Passing through Atkins, she had a clear view of the new brick façade of the J.M. Maus Company, a two-story block that was more like a Little Rock department store than a backwoods general emporium. To one side of the store the wagons of trappers were unloading their contents of furs, fox and possum skins, to be traded for merchandise. The people, especially the men, did not exhibit any pretense or cultivation in their appearance; they were an anticipation of the roughcast yeomen she would encounter in Newton County.

She rode into the sunset at Russellville, and thereafter the little stations the train passed were illuminated only by single lights over their depot signs: Ouita, Mill Creek, London, Scotia, Piney. There are so many little towns out there, she reflected, and so many little lives, all of them strange to me. There are two aspects of travel by rail that she was acutely aware of: one is the sense of “out-thereness,” of all that lies on both sides of this passage; and the other is of this passage itself, this channel, this extended tube through which one is passed, with a beginning and an end.

She broke free in the middle. Halfway between Conway and Fort Smith, at Clarksville, she left this tube and entered the out-there. After a night at the St. James Hotel, where she sheltered Rosabone in the hotel’s horse-barn, and after a good early breakfast of oats for the mare and oatmeal for the rider, they struck out northward along a winding road pointing toward the mountains. The morning was very cold but clear, the air bracing. Viridis let Rosabone set her own pace, with an occasional run on the downslope of hills. Horse and rider had not gone more than a few miles, as far as Ludwig, before they encountered the first signs of astonishment in bystanders or other riders. The other riders were all male, and they had to look twice to see that she was not, and then, if there were two or more of them, they had to do a lot of talking among themselves about this exceptional circumstance of a lone woman in pants riding astraddle. Yard dogs who ordinarily would have chased a passing horse for a while ran out and took one sniff and gave her a tilted-head look. Women stood with their hands on their hips and their mouths open.

But there were not a lot of people. North of Harmony, which she reached at midmorning (and paused to admire the quaint stone church there), the fields gave way mostly to forests, with only an occasional farm before