The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [79]
—Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.
O’er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.
I never thought that “behind” could rhyme with “wind”; you’d have to change the way you say one or the other, and I didn’t, as I read it, and Mr. Perry didn’t correct me, and the way I pronounced “wind” was lost anyway beneath the sound of a sob from Dorinda, who then commenced another one of the crying jags she had all the time these days. As I said before, she no longer shared my desk; she had been moved, first down to where the third-graders sat, but then Mr. Perry had completely lost patience with her and had her sit over to one side of the first-graders, big enough to be their mother but too big to share a desk with any of them, so she was just sitting on the stool that Mr. Perry sometimes used for the dunce’s corner and had to borrow from her when he needed to make somebody sit on it there, and of course there were jokes about her being our permanent dunce, with or without the corner. Whether or not she was dumb enough to be with the first-graders was questionable, but she certainly cried more than any of them ever did. The least little thing would set her off, and I should have known when I read “Lucy Gray” that it was going to give her a real fit of weeping. If only she knew that the lady who was going to save her soul was on her way up to the Chism place!
Up on the lilting mountain far above the village is a farmplace so old the trees still sing of it. There is a pretty trail rising from the village of Stay More to the farmplace; the trail meanders all over creation before it gets up there, and from places along it you can see forever across the hollers and the hills. The trees singing their fool heads off were a fat maple whose name I wish I knew and a gangling walnut I’d have to call a lady’s name were I to dub it, neither of them with even a leftover brown leaf from last autumn, although their buds were swelling and the only green in sight, save the copse of cedars and the first sign of new grass, were the nests of mistletoe in the upper limbs of the maple, mistletoe a shade of green that you only see in winter, winter’s green, which has a special song of its own. I wish Viridis could have heard these trees a-yodeling like crazy as she drove into sight of them, and maybe she did, for all I know. I don’t know everything about this story.
I know how Nancy Nail Chism had been listening, not to her trees a-warbling but to the coffeepot a-rattling on the stove, sometime before: a sure sign that company was coming. While she was drying the breakfast dishes, she had dropped the towel, and that means a stranger will arrive very soon; she watched to see if she’d drop it a second time, which means the stranger will be hungry and need something to eat, but she didn’t. Seth Chism had dropped his case knife while he was eating: that was proof the stranger coming would be a female; if he’d dropped his fork, it would have been a man on his way up the mountain. “Seth!” she’d said to him when he helped himself to some more of the elderberry jam even though he already had some on his plate; if you absent-mindedly help yourself to something you’ve already got on your plate, it means the stranger coming will be hungry for the same thing. While she’d drunk her own coffee, Nancy had paid close attention to the cup and noticed that coffee grounds were clinging to the sides of it, which was a sign that the visitor would be bringing good news. Also, her left eye was itching; if her right eye had started