The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [73]
When, shortly after dark, at the top of a steep climb up Moon Hull Mountain, she reached a village that had a hotel, or something resembling one, although the simple sign said only hotell, and inquired of the village’s name, a man told her it was called Loafer’s Glory. Which indeed was its name (I had been there once with my mother, who had an aunt living there; it was the farthest I’d ever been from home), but officially, as far as the United States Post Office Department was concerned, an institution that often made unfeeling mistakes, as I would come to learn to my sorrow, the place was named Fallsville, which it is still called on maps, at least those few maps which show it. There’s nothing wrong with “Fallsville,” and there was, as Viridis discovered the next morning, a pretty waterfall in the headwaters of the Mulberry River, but Loafer’s Glory is a fine name for a town, almost as fine as Stay More. The Dixons, Bowens, Habbards, Rykers, Cowans, Durhams, and Sutherlands did as much loafing in their village as the folks in ours did of staying, which is to say, for as long as they could, until neither loafing nor staying was any longer possible or glorious.
Loafer’s Glory is down in the southwest corner of Newton County, but Viridis didn’t realize she had already reached the county of her destination. She still had a hard day’s ride to go to reach Stay More. She and Rosabone needed a good night’s rest, which the “Hotell,” Sutherland’s, provided. It was like no hotel she had been in before: two guest rooms upstairs sharing a common washstand, her room just large enough for an old-fashioned iron bedstead with a cornshuck mattress and a pair of light down quilts over it. The occupant of the other room was a traveling “drummer,” or salesman, for a wholesale grocery outfit in Fayetteville. He tried to get friendly. He suggested to Viridis that they might get warmed up with a little peach brandy he had with him, but she declined, saying she’d had a hard ride today and expected a harder one tomorrow. She got up in the morning before he did and beat him to the washstand, and was finished with her breakfast before he came downstairs.
There is a Y in the main road at Loafer’s Glory, and the left fork would have taken her into Madison County and toward Pettigrew, which Tom Fletcher had suggested as the terminus of her rail ride, but she took the right fork eastward toward Swain and Nail, a village named for the maternal grandfather of Viridis’ obsession. She did not know this then, but she reached it in midafternoon, and, inquiring the distance and direction to Stay More (for it was here she would have to turn north again), was told that it was only six miles, but six rough, crooked, uphill miles, and she wouldn’t be able to make it before dark.
She should have spent the night in Nail. Although the village had no hotel, or anything approximating one, any villager would have shown her hospitality and could probably have regaled her with stories about Jethro Nail, that maternal grandfather, from whom the hero of this story acquired a large measure of his sense of humor as well as his sense of injustice. But, so close to her destination, Viridis was eager to get on.
She would discover that Stay More had no hotel, or anything approximating one either…when she reached it. The reaching was hard. Of the whole journey from Clarksville, of her entire experience with bridle paths and trails and roads, those last six miles were the hardest. Indeed, that road from Nail