The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [94]
She kept on babbling to herself like that until finally Nail said, “Git up, Rindy.” The sound of his voice at last seemed to jolt her back to the real world, and she looked at him as if he’d said something wonderful and nice to her, and she got one of those fancy shoes up under her and began to rise up.
She stood up, although she didn’t stand straight. She was hunched in the back like she didn’t have any right to hold her head up anymore. She stood bent over like that and said, “I done tole Very everthing the way it really was, that it was Sull and not you who done it.”
“What did Sull do?” he asked.
“Ever last thing I tole in court that you had done, jist lak I tole it, on’y hit was him, not you.”
“But you let him,” Nail said.
She shook her head. “Naw. He tuck me. He tole me to play-like you was him, so’s I’d know how it felt.”
Nail slammed his hand against the screen separating them, as if he could knock it down. “The son of a bitch!” he said.
Bird waved his shotgun barrel. “Hey, watch it there, big fella.”
Nail turned his back to Bird and Rindy so they could not see his anger. He walked toward the door leading out of the visit room but, on reaching it, turned and walked back to the screen, and said to her, “Did he hurt you?”
“Uh-huh, a lot,” she said. “A whole lot.”
“Then how come ye to…how could ye…Rindy, for godsakes, why did ye do a favor for him?”
She hung her head. “They paid me,” she said.
“They?” he said. “They who?”
“The sherf and them,” she said.
“How much?”
“They’s sposed to of paid me thirty dollars but they never guv me but ten, and they said they’d give me the rest when you got…when they kilt ye in that burnin-cheer…but I said I didn’t want ’em to do that. Nail, I believed to my soul that the onliest thing they’d ever do to ye was to make ye stop botherin ’em the way ye was, with the federal law and all. I had no idee atall they’d th’ow ye in prison, let alone try to put ye in the burnin-cheer.”
“You sat there in that courtroom,” he reminded her, “and you heared ole Link Villines sentence me to death.”
“When he said that, I got the all-overs,” she said. “I had the all-overs so bad I couldn’t even think straight, let alone say nothin.”
“You could’ve said somethin afore now.”
“Sull would’ve kilt me,” she said. “He tried. He tried to kill Very too.”
“What?”
She used up a good chunk of her fifteen minutes to tell him the story of how Viridis had spent the night in the Buckhorn Hotel at Jasper when she was trying to find all the jurymen to sign her “position,” and how Sull had come in the middle of the night to the Buckhorn and confronted her and fired at her through the door, and then how Viridis had kept Sull and the sheriff and them from getting to Rindy that morning the men of Stay More were about to invade Jasper. Rindy talked so fast Nail couldn’t follow her and get it all straight. Now Rindy was going on about how Sull had tried to catch them as they were leaving Newton County and had followed them in his car up around Loafer’s Glory, and they had had to ride Very’s mare off into the woods to get away from him, and he had abandoned his car and come on foot after them and got close enough at one point to shoot up all the ammunition that his automatic would hold, and Very had fired back at him with a six-shooter she had, and maybe hit him, they couldn’t tell, but they had got away from him, deeper into the woods, and lost, and when they got back on the main road to Clarksville they never saw any more of him.
Then she was silent. “Go on with yore knittin,” he told her.
“That’s all,” she said. “That was day afore yestiddy. Then we come on down yere to Little Rock. Aint it a big place? Aint this town a sight on airth?”
“I don’t rightly know,” he admitted.