The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [77]
These two Little Rock ladies, the one eighty-six, the other sixty years younger, stayed up talking until bedtime, and even beyond, telling each other their stories and their reasons, very good ones, for being in Stay More. The old woman certainly knew about the trial and conviction of Nail Chism, although she did not know enough of the facts of the case to have any opinion on Nail’s guilt or innocence. Summers she sat on her front porch and observed the men sitting on the storeporch across the way, and she knew which one was Nail, because he was taller than the others, younger than most of them, quieter, less inclined to joking although a quick audience for others’ jokes, but of course she was in no position to say whether he had been there at his usual time on that particular afternoon, which was just one more June day in a passage of rare ones. Yes, she knew of the Whitters; they were the “dregs” of Stay More society, and Dorinda’s oldest brother Ike had been the town’s ruffian and rowdy until the day the lynch mob disposed of him. The woman showed Viridis a number of plugged-up bullet holes in the walls of her front rooms, souvenirs of a raging gun battle Ike Whitter and his cronies had fought with the lynch mob, who had commandeered her house and required her to cower in a back room, frightened out of her wits, while every pane of glass in her house was shattered. This had happened ten years before, but the old woman still trembled sometimes in recollection of it.
At breakfast the next morning (Viridis had slept wonderfully and warmly on a thick mattress stuffed with goose down, beneath several heirloom quilts, in a big walnut four-poster in the one of the three front rooms that had been Sarah Ingledew’s) the gracious old woman, urging a second helping of bacon and eggs on Viridis, said, “You aren’t intending to wear those today, are you?” and indicated Viridis’ jodhpurs.
“I expect to do a good bit of riding,” Viridis explained.
The woman shook her head. “You might do some riding, but you won’t do any visiting if you wear those.” And when breakfast was finished, she suggested they take their third cups of coffee back into Sarah’s room. Viridis, the woman observed, was the same size that Sarah had been. The woman opened a walnut wardrobe, then took down a dress and held it against Viridis for a moment, replaced it, and took down another, until she had one that she considered “not too dressy but good enough.” Viridis protested that she couldn’t ride Rosabone in that dress. “You aren’t going to ride Rosabone,” the woman said, and then selected the shoes, which were twenty years out of style and unlike any that Viridis had ever worn. And then the hat, or bonnet, rather. And a shawl. “And now the finishing touch, what Sarah called her thanky-poke,” the woman said, giving Viridis a purse to carry, a purse larger and fancier than any she would ever have dared hold in Little Rock. The woman turned Viridis to look at herself in the mirror and commented, “I declare, if it weren’t for your red hair, you are Sarah.” Viridis felt a bit uncomfortable, not because of the fit of the clothes or their being twenty years out of fashion but because she felt she had no right to be wearing the clothing of the former first lady of Arkansas. She expected to do a lot of local traveling and interviewing today, and she didn’t want to expose the clothes to dirt and dust and snow and mud.
The old woman dressed herself in attire that was also from an earlier era, the 1890s, and then she led Viridis out of the house, down the steps, and across the road to Willis Ingledew’s General Store. The storekeeper (who was also postmaster of Stay More that year) was in his customary captain’s chair facing the large potbellied stove whose stovepipe rose three floors straight up to the roof as the centerpiece surrounded by the balcony of the second floor, where the clothing and shoe departments were. There were a dozen other men sitting in chairs or on bulging wooden kegs within the radius of the stove’s warmth. Two of these men faced each other across a