The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [85]
I pushed aside the old discarded quilt that served as a doorflap for the playhouse, and I looked inside. There was Rindy, kneeling, head bowed, clutching against her bosom one of our oldest discarded dolls. She was swaying slowly to and fro, rocking the headless and mouldering dollbaby and crooning a sort of lullaby to it. She was wearing an old rag of a coat, a threadbare thing that couldn’t be keeping her warm. Viridis followed me into the playhouse.
“Miss Monday,” I said, making the introductions, “this here is Dorinda June Whitter.”
Viridis Monday stayed a whole week in Stay More. Every night, sometimes before dark if she could manage it, she would return the team and buggy to Ingledew’s Livery and then cross the road to Jacob Ingledew’s house and sit up until bedtime talking to the old woman. That ancient dowager would serve a fortified wine from a Spanish town called Jerez. Usually Viridis reported in detail to the woman on what she had achieved during the day, and sometimes the woman would give her advice or at least make commentary on that day’s events and accomplishments. It was the old woman who (out of her experience as social secretary to the state’s first lady) drafted the wording of the petition to the governor, for Viridis to take with her on her rounds of interviewing the citizens of Stay More and some other places in Newton County, for their signatures or their X’s. Surely, I thought, the woman herself would have been the first to sign the petition, but she was not, because, you have to remember, that was still four years before suffrage, four years before that June day when Congress would give women the right to vote or even to sign effective petitions. Except for Dorinda’s, all of the signatures and X’s on Viridis’ petition were men’s…including nine of the original twelve jurymen who had convicted Nail. If she could have found them, she would have had all twelve.
Viridis invited Dorinda and me to ride with her in the phaeton when she set off for Jasper to hunt up some of the jurymen. It was a Sunday, and sunny, the first really warm day we’d had that year, with the last of the patches of snow melting into the earth; a good day for a drive, without the road too muddy yet. Rindy and I both wore our best; hers was that same white Sears lawn dress she’d worn for the trial, which was out of season for February but all she had that would look good for going into the county seat on a Sunday. She was cheerful. I hadn’t seen her so happy since this whole business had started back in June of the year before. Whatever burden of guilt had been mashing down on her was lifted by the confession she readily gave to Viridis, making a clean breast of it, exonerating poor Nail completely. She wouldn’t yet give Viridis the details of just how Sull Jerram had put her up to it, but she was ready to swear that Nail had never even touched her. She was awfully sorry. She’d had no idea at all that they would take him off and put him in that electric chair and try to kill him. Why, she’d been led to believe the most they’d ever do to him was make him say he was sorry he threatened to sic the federal law on Sull and his courthouse pals.
The first to put his big John Hancock on Viridis’ petition was Jim Tom Duckworth, who had been Nail’s lawyer before they got rid of him in favor of that Farrell Cobb, and he didn’t have any bitterness for having been dismissed and was a real gentleman about it: he not only signed the petition but wrote out an exact copy of it and put on his hat and coat and went off to get a whole bunch of signatures or X’s himself. He was the one who gave Viridis the names and general addresses of the twelve jurymen. On her