The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [8]
He didn’t go to the wedding. It wasn’t much of a thing anyhow, although his brothers told him of all the food he’d missed out on, pies you’d never heard of before. Nor did he join the shivaree that was thrown to tease the newlyweds. He couldn’t stand the sight of Sull Jerram, and any man with any sense at all should have been able to tell from Nail’s eyes that he couldn’t stand the sight of him and wanted him off the earth, but Sull was a town boy and all he saw in Nail’s eyes was a dumb, sullen kid.
Irene Chism Jerram miscarried her baby and never had any children after that. The years went by. Sull was elected assessor, and folks said the only thing that kept him from running for sheriff was he was too trigger-happy. Irene lived in Jasper but would come home about twice a year for a long visit until Sull came to get her. One of the times he came to get her, or tried to, was in an automobile, the first car to get that far. Eli Willard had driven the first automobile to appear in Stay More, but he hadn’t been able to drive up Right Prong, because there wasn’t any road, just a trail; when Sull Jerram tried it, there wasn’t any road either, but he was mad to get Irene back and he drove over some boulders and plowed down some saplings to get up to the Chism place and spooked the livestock and, according to Seth Chism, spoiled a whole batch of sour mash a-brewing at the hooch plant. Irene wouldn’t go with him. He stayed for a few days, arguing with her, trying to persuade Nancy or Seth to talk some sense into her, and, finally, appealing to Nail himself.
“You’re the only one she listens to,” Sull told Nail. “She don’t listen to me nor nobody. You tell her that she caint spend the rest of her life up here on this mountain.”
“Why caint she?” Nail asked. He wasn’t a kid anymore and was half a head higher than Sull Jerram and still remembered as if it were yesterday the tricks Sull used to pull on him.
“Why, because, she’s, don’t you see? she’s my wife, and if she wants to be my wife she’s got to live in Jasper.” Sull paused and studied Nail’s eyes. “Don’t that make no sense to ye? Do you want me to say it again?”
“If I was you,” Nail said, “I’d git that piece of machinery back down the mountain while it will still roll. Come tomorrow, you might not find any wheels left on it.”
But Sull Jerram did not go back to Jasper. Someone said he’d spent the night down at the Whitter place, and folks laughed and said the Whitters was probably the only ones who’d give him a bed, he was that low, they was that low, the Whitters. Some years before, not long after the turn of the century, the only criminal Stay More ever had, in its peaceful history, had come from that family. Ike Whitter had killed a man and terrorized the sheriff himself before a lynch mob led by John Ingledew ganged up on him and stopped him and lynched him. But Ike’s father Simon Whitter still ran the farm and kept his head high and apologized to no man for having sired the only bully, felon, and cutthroat in the history of the village, and some of Ike’s younger brothers threatened to become as wayward as he had been, while his baby sister Dorinda was growing up into a turtledove who, it was said, would drive men to rash deeds and early graves.
After a few nights at the Whitter place, Sull loaded all the Whitter boys into his vehicle and took them into Jasper to see the sights. Dorinda would have gone too, young as she was, if she’d had her way about it, but not even the Whitters, low as they were, would have condoned a young girl going off to the county seat with a married man and nobody to chaperone her but her brothers.
Dorinda