The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [80]
So even before Viridis drove into sight, Nancy knew this much about her: she was a woman, and she was coming to visit, and she would want some elderberry jam, and she would bring good news. Thus the only thing surprising when Viridis came driving up into the Chisms’ yard was that she was driving old Jake Ingledew’s phaeton and was wearing old Sarey Ingledew’s visiting-clothes. Nancy’s first thought was that the lady had the wrong house, but all those signs couldn’t have been so far wrong. So Nancy went ahead and declared, “Howdy. We’ve been lookin fer ye.”
Had Nail got word to them? Viridis wondered. She saw at once how Nail resembled his mother: Nancy had given him not just his eyes but his eyebrows, his long nose with its strongly shaped end, and his full mouth. Nancy was in good health, and it was almost like seeing Nail the way he ought to be.
“I’m Viridis Chism,” she said, but then she put her hand to her mouth and corrected herself. “I mean, I’m Viridis Monday. You must be Nancy Chism.”
“Yes’m, that’s me,” Nancy acknowledged.
“I’ve come from Little Rock to talk to you about your son Nail.”
As Nancy told it later, the good news that she’d learned to expect when she’d seen the coffee grounds on the side of her cup was simply that Viridis Monday was here. Not that she brought word of any governor’s pardon or Nail’s escape or even that Nail was in good health, but that Viridis Monday was here to tell what she knew, to find out what she wanted to find out, to do what she wanted: to learn everything about Nail; to convince herself of what she already believed: there was no way Nail could have done what he’d been convicted of; and then to do what she intended to do: get everybody to sign a petition, which would go to the governor.
Viridis spent the whole day with the Chisms, not just Nancy but also Nail’s father Seth, and his younger brother Luther, and Nail’s older sister Irene, who had once been the wife of Sull Jerram and was, in fact, still married to him. Viridis would come back again later, several times, but this first day she would talk with the Chisms all day, or until time for school to let out, when she would come looking for me. Viridis listened to Nancy tell the whole story of Nail’s life, such as it was, not very exciting or eventful or anything to brag about. In the whole house she had just a couple of photographs of Nail that she could show to Viridis, one taken by Eli Willard the year he first brought the camera to Stay More, and another one Nail had made up in Eureka Springs, the farthest he’d ever been from home until they took him off to Little Rock. The Eureka photograph was one of those trick pictures with props where you pose in front of a fake scene, and it showed Nail dressed in some Wild West costume with sheepskin chaps and a ten-gallon hat and a pair of six-shooters, standing in front of the Palace of Versailles, an incongruity that was lost on subject and photographer. But it was a good picture of Nail at the age of nineteen, handsome and sightly. Viridis asked if she could borrow the picture and have her newspaper make a copy of it, and she would return the original.
Spreading her elderberry jam on her biscuit, Viridis asked, “Did Nail ever have a girlfriend?”
Nancy Chism laughed a bit. “I have to tell ye a little story,” she said, and she told about Nail’s very first girlfriend, sort of. When the McCoys used to live at the next place down the road, the place where Waymon Chism lives now with his wife, there was a little girl named Dorothea Lea McCoy, about the same age as Nail, three, and sometimes when Mrs. McCoy came to visit with Nancy, she’d put “Dorthlee,” as everybody called her, out in the yard to play with little Nail, under that maple tree that he thought was his own. Sometimes Dorthlee would get permission to walk up the road from her house to play with Nail under the maple even when her mother wasn’t visiting Nancy. One day Dorthlee came running into the Chism house hollering, “Miz Chism, Nail’s a-pickin yore flars!