The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [84]
“Nail thinks you believe he’s innocent,” she said.
Finally I had to look her in the eye to let her know that I meant this: “I don’t jist believe it. I know it.” That was the first thing I ever said to Viridis Monday, I want it recorded here.
“You have nice eyes,” she remarked. “He said you did.”
I guess I blushed furiously. “You have better’uns,” I declared.
Again that smile, and I must have tried to ape it without letting her see my bad teeth again. She reached out and put her hand lightly on my arm. “You know I’m here to save him,” she said.
“Here?” was all I could think to say, as if it were here in this house that he was facing that electric chair.
“Here on earth,” she said.
I was brave, and I said, “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“Would you show me the playhouse?” she asked.
I had to think about that, I’m sorry to say. Looking back, I should have just nodded my head eagerly and said, “Come on!” But I couldn’t quite yet bring myself to violate so easily a solemn oath, even if I didn’t care a fig for the person I’d made the oath to. So I had to think about it, for a long moment, with the clock a-ticking away on the fireboard. Finally I said, “We swore we’d never tell anybody where it is.”
“I understand,” she said. And another long minute went by before she said, “Well, maybe you could just describe it to me.”
I stood up. “No, I’ll take ye. What I swore don’t matter anymore. Not to me, it don’t.” I fetched my wrap and told Momma we’d be back in time for supper.
We weren’t. It’s a good brisk hike any time of year up the mountainside to the place where that old playhouse leans up against that old basso profundo oak tree. On that late-winter afternoon we had to walk around the snowy places, and she was being extra careful not to get the hem of her fancy dress in the mud. She talked a lot, telling me every little detail of how she’d come to stay with the old woman at Jacob Ingledew’s and how the old woman had let her dress in Sarah’s costume from twenty years before.
She seemed more impressed with that oak tree than with the playhouse, which was just a pile of lumber anyhow. She stood there looking up at the tree for the longest time. I told her it was a white oak tree. It was over a hundred feet high (I’d climbed it once as far as I could go and measured it with a ball of twine), and it must have been overlooked when they cut nearly every white oak in the county to make staves for whiskey barrels…not for Chism’s Dew but shipped off to the big government distillers in far places like Kentucky. I’m not even sure that tree was on land that belonged to my father, but I knew I owned that tree as much as anybody did.
“Did you know,” she said quietly, looking up at the great tree, “that Nail thinks trees can sing?”
I was surprised that she would say it like that, almost as if she didn’t quite believe it herself. It wasn’t till later that I learned she believed it just as fiercely as he did. I was also surprised at what I said myself then: “That makes two of us.”
“Oh, do you believe it too?” she said, looking at me with delight, as if somehow all this business about singing trees were more important than the question of Nail’s innocence. And then she asked, “Is this tree singing right now?”
I honestly couldn’t have said that it was, at least I wasn’t hearing anything, but I looked at her as if she were deaf, and said, “Don’t you hear it?” I was just being playful, sort of teasing, but she looked startled and then began listening. When she perked up her ears like that, I did too.
We heard it.
Yes, the tree was intoning some sorrowful, deep spiritual, and there is no mistake