The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [87]
on the bed, and said, “I want to talk to her.” Viridis said she was sorry but he hadn’t even had the courtesy to introduce himself and she wasn’t in the mood to entertain strangers at this late hour. Sull looked like she had spit in his face, and he said, “Lady, they tell me yo’re from Little Rock. Okay, that’s where that nuthouse is, aint it? That’s whar she belongs. Rindy is rampin tetched in her haid, and ary fool thing she says to ye won’t be but some lie-tale she jist imagined. Now send her out here before I come in thar and git her.” But Viridis stood in the doorway and told him that if Dorinda was mentally unsound it would not be wise for her to talk with a man who was both mentally deficient and irascible. From where I sat I could tell that it took Sull a while to figure out those words, and then he got even more irascible. “I swear to God, lady, I’ll make ye wush ye was never born! You don’t know who yo’re talkin to. You might be some big somebody down thar to Little Rock, but this yere is Jasper, Newton County, by God, and I’m the by-God county jedge! Now, I got some words to say to Rindy aint nary bit of yore be-ness, and I aim to say ’em to her! Rindy! You thar now, Rindy! Gitch yore hide out chere!” Poor Dorinda was trembling something terrible and making little motions as if she were trying to obey him by getting up out of the bed, but she couldn’t really move. Viridis told him to leave or she’d call the manager. “Call him, goddammit!” Sull hollered at the top of his voice. “He’s a good friend of mine lak everbody else in this town! Call him and see what he does to ye! Snoopin meddler bitch!” Viridis put her hands up on his chest and gave him a shove that pushed him clean to the other side of the hall, and then she slammed the door and bolted it. She motioned for us to get back into the bed, and she took a step in our direction just in time to avoid the bullets that came blasting through the door. Sull fired three shots real quick that left three big holes in the door panel and broke the mirror on the dresser. Rindy screamed, and I guess I must have hollered myself. Viridis tilted the whole bed up on its side and got us down behind it, so it partly shielded us from the door. She crawled on her stomach to reach where she’d left her purse, and she opened that purse and took out her big six-shooter and cocked it and kept it pointed toward the door. But Sull didn’t fire any more shots. Some other people in the hotel down the hall must have come out to see what was happening and were yelling at him, and then a man, it must have been the owner, was yelling at him, “Jedge! Jedge, have you done gone crazy?” I couldn’t hear all the words out there in the hall, but finally the man said, “Git out of here, Jedge!” and repeated it a few times. Sull stepped back to the door, and his voice came through those bullet holes: “Rindy, now you lissen a me, gal! You jist keep yore trap shut, hear me? You keep that trap shut or I’ve got a bullet with yore name writ all over it!” Then it got quiet. After a while there was a knock and the manager asked if everything was okay. Viridis wouldn’t open the door. She asked the manager to summon the constable. The manager said there wasn’t no constable, just the sheriff. “Snow?” she said, and the manager called back through the door, “Yes ma’am. Want me to git him?” “Never mind,” she said, and she straightened up the bed and turned off the lamp and we tried our best to sleep.
But of course none of us could sleep. By and by Viridis asked, “Do you know any good stories you could tell?” and I told the best ghost story I could remember, and that passed some time. “Rindy?” Viridis said. “Do you know any stories?”
For a minute I thought she might have already fallen asleep, but she hadn’t. “Could I tell a real story?” she finally asked. “Not a tellin-story, no, not a windy, but the pure fack?” We didn’t tell her she couldn’t, so she did. “I’ll tell you’uns how it come about that Sull Jerram ruint me.”
From that night on, Dorinda and I were best friends again. We hardly had time to enjoy it,