The Choiring Of The Trees (5 page)

“That so?” Sull said. “Got skeert bad this run, huh?”

“Naw, but me and Luther did have a little talk with a Boone County deppity.”

Jim Tom and the Sheriff moved a little closer, to hear better, but Nail didn’t elaborate upon his conversation with the deputy. Sull said, “Well, Nail, son, I’m sorry to tell ye, but you aint got any choice. Everbody’s dependin on ye to run that stuff.”

“Find somebody else to depend on,” Nail said calmly, but he was beginning to get angry.

“Aint nobody else with a wagon full of wool,” Sull said.

“I want ye to stop sparkin Dorinda,” Nail said.

Sull laughed. “You sweet on her?”

“Naw, but I’m sweet on Irene, and I don’t want ye treatin her like that.”

“Yo’re welcome to Irene,” Sull said. “Nobody else wants her.”

Nail hit Sull. According to Jim Tom, who told it later around Stay More, Nail just clenched a fist and lifted it faster than anybody could watch and caught Sull under the chin with it and lifted him about a foot off the floor and slammed him up against the wall. Just one punch, and Sull sort of peeled down the wall and into a heap on the floor. Nail turned and walked off, and Jim Tom and Duster Snow lifted Sull into a chair and worked him over to get him awake, and to pacify him Sheriff Snow said to Sull, “I’ll have a little talk with ole Seth fer ye.” And that night the sheriff came to Stay More for the first time and rode his horse up to the Chism place up there on the mountain and sat on the porch with Seth Chism until well past dark, and even spent the night, at Seth’s invitation.

The next morning, as the sheriff was saddling his horse, Nail Chism came down from the pastures where he’d spent the night with his sheep, and walked right up to Duster Snow and said, “Sheriff, you and Sull aint about to make me run any more goods fer ye.”

“We’ll jist see about that, son,” Duster Snow said.

“Yeah,” said Seth Chism to Nail, “you’d best listen to what I got to tell ye, boy. We don’t want to make Mr. Snow mad. He could bust up our still, ye know.”

Nail became very angry. “Go ahead and dust it, Buster!” he snarled at the sheriff, but corrected himself: “Go ahead and bust it, Duster! You bust our still, and I’ll tell the federal law the names of everbody who’s been runnin liquor to Harrison.”

“Reckon yo’re under arrest, boy,” Duster informed him. The sheriff arrested Nail on a charge of assault and battery against the county judge, Sull, and took Nail into Jasper and put him into that big stone jail that’s still there, off the square. Jim Tom tried to bail him out but couldn’t get Nail to meet the condition: to retract his threat to expose the bootleggers to the federal law. So the sheriff let Nail stew for a week in the jailhouse. Jim Tom said the courthouse politicians, of which he was not one himself, were scared of Nail. The politicians, especially the county judge himself, were scared Nail might carry out the threat, he might try to contact Raiding Deputy Collector John T. Burris of the U.S. Revenue Service, or (they hoped Nail was too ignorant to know of the existence of the legendary Burris) he might at least have a chat with Isaac Stapleton, Stay More’s own former deputy collector and onetime assistant to Burris, recently retired from a long career of working downstate busting up stills in Perry and Scott counties. If Stapleton told Nail how to contact Burris, that might blow the lid off the bootlegging operation.

Nail said he wouldn’t have minded staying in the Jasper jail, awful as it was, except that there was nobody to take care of his sheep. His brothers Waymon and Luther visited him, and he tried to explain to them how to do the many little jobs that a shepherd must handle in the month of May, but it was clear that Waymon and Luther didn’t know anything about sheep. The law couldn’t keep Nail in the Jasper jail forever, and Jim Tom convinced Sull and the courthouse gang of politicians of that, so they “released him on his own recognizance,” whatever that meant, but first the entire courthouse gang took him into the jury room and sat around the table with him and talked to him for half the night, and then Sull Jerram told him they would let him go if he’d keep his mouth shut.

But Nail refused to make any promises.

“Oh, Latha, he
loves
me!” Dorinda exclaimed to me one morning in June on our way to school. It was the last week of the seventh grade for us, and Miss Blankinship was quitting after that, and we’d get us a new teacher the next year, and we could hardly wait to see her go, and meanwhile the weather was beautiful and cool for that time of year, although it was very dry and hadn’t rained since May 4
^th
and wouldn’t rain again for the rest of the summer.

“Who does?” I asked. I wasn’t sure but what she might have heard some of the gossip about Nail Chism having a crush on her, as his motive for hitting Sull Jerram.

“Sull!” she said. “The
judge
! He told me so! Well, he didn’t come right out and use that
word,
but he said to me, says, ‘Rindy, sugar babe, you shore make my ole heart beat
fast
!’ and guess what? He plans to up and leave that Irene for good!”

“Rindy honey sister sweety dear,” I said as nicely as I could, “you have just got to be
careful,
I know in my bones that a feller like Sull Jerram just wants to get
under your dress.
”

“So?” she said. “I aint skeert. He’d do it real nice, and I’d even enjoy it myself, I bet ye.”

“And you’d find yourself swole up with a woodscolt!”

“Then he’d dist
have
to marry me!”

“He’s already married, you fool!”

But trying to talk some sense into Dorinda Whitter was like teaching a kitten to eat apples. She didn’t give a hoot what the world thought of her, and I doubt she cared for my opinions either. When we were still children, she had said to me, “You’re whole lots smarter than me, and that’s how come I lak ye so, but dist don’t never try to tell me what to do.” No use trying to convince her that she was pretty enough to get the best husband in the country if she’d only take her time and behave herself instead of chasing after the first man with an auto to come to town. Sure, Sull Jerram was handsome and sightly, and smart and smooth, and now he was rich to boot, but I wouldn’t have gone into the bushes with him if he’d had three silver balls!

A few days later, after school let out, Dorinda and I were taking a shortcut up through the woods toward our playhouse on the south slope of Ledbetter Mountain. There’s an old cowpath runs up through that copse of chanting walnuts, and we were just tripping along one behind the other up that cowpath when here come Nail Chism, nearly running over us, except he wasn’t running, just walking the way he did, with long, gangling strides.

“Howdy, girls,” was all he said, and grinned bashfully in that woman-shy way that bachelors have.

Rindy and I were so astonished to find somebody on that old cowpath in the woods that we didn’t say anything, and he walked around us and went on his way, and we went on ours, but Rindy kept looking back over her shoulder, as if he might have turned, and once when she did that I challenged her: “You think he’s follerin us?”

“Shhh,” she hushed me, and whispered, “I
know
he’s follerin us!”

I said, “Why would he do that?”

“Shhh! Why do you
think,
you silly?!” she whispered, and said, “Ess go!” and began running. We ran all the way up the hill out of the woods and into the meadow and kept running until we reached our playhouse. We got ourselves inside of it, and Rindy knelt at the one little window and peered out, panting and watching, panting and watching. I looked around me, at the poor interior of our old playhouse, and realized that we had outgrown it and would soon be having to give it up.

“Nail Chism wouldn’t foller us,” I declared.

“You don’t think so?” she demanded. “Then tell me who’s that, Miss Smarty! Santy Claus?” She pointed, and there, down at the edge of the woods, edge of the meadow, far off, stood a man. He was just looking up the hillside toward our playhouse. My heart skipped a couple of beats. Was it Nail? He wasn’t close enough to tell for sure, and you couldn’t tell by his clothes: the men all dressed alike in blue denim overalls and a store shirt and a felt hat. Even those courthouse politicians dressed that way. He just stood there, looking in our direction. We waited. I said to her that whoever it was, he wouldn’t come up to our playhouse and bother us, because there were two of us and we could handle him, but I think I was just talking to myself, not to her.

Finally he disappeared back into the woods. We stayed in the playhouse for a long time, but we were too old for play, and when we left it, we were leaving it for good. Dorinda asked me if I’d come spend the night with her. Sure, I said. “Go ask your mother,” she said. I said she could come with me while I asked my mother. She said no, she’d go on home and do her chores and tell her mother to set out another plate for supper, and for me to just come on whenever I was able.

I went home and told my mother I wanted to spend the night at Dorinda’s. My mother didn’t mind, but I had to slop the hogs and milk the cow before I went. I did, and then I went to Dorinda’s.

The Whitter place was set back up into a hollow on the west side of Ledbetter Mountain: just a two-room log cabin that had a couple of sleeping-lofts and a shed behind the kitchen, which was Dorinda’s room. There were several horses tied to cedar posts in the front yard, and I assumed they were just the riding-beasts of the Whitter boys, but then I remembered the Whitters were too poor to own more than one horse.

One of those horses belonged to Doc Plowright, and he was inside. Another belonged to Hoy Murrison, who was a Stay More sheriff’s deputy, and a third was that of Alonzo Swain, our justice of the peace. While I was there, some other horses arrived, with men on them.

When I said to Mrs. Whitter, “Did Rindy tell ye, I’ve come to stay the night?” she looked at me as if I’d said I was flying off to the moon, and she ignored me while she told the new arrivals, “Doc and Hoy is with her in yonder house.” And the new arrivals climbed the porch and went in. Then she looked back at me, not as if I’d said I was flying off to the moon but as if I had returned from it, and she seemed to recognize me, and said, “Latha, hon, my baby has been ravaged.”

Then she began to cry.

Sheriff Snow sat with me on the edge of the porch. He asked me to tell him what time it was I’d seen her last, and I said I’d just have to guess, it was maybe 4:30
P.M.
He asked me to tell him what we’d been doing, and I told him we’d been to our playhouse. He asked where the playhouse was. Dorinda and I had sworn each other to eternal secrecy that we would never tell anyone else about the location of our playhouse, and I couldn’t tell Sheriff Snow. I think I told him, “Up yonderways,” and gestured vaguely toward the east.

“Did you see anybody else up in that vicinity?” he asked, pronouncing it
vi
-sinitty. There was a man, I said. He was a right far ways off and I couldn’t see him too well, and I didn’t know who he was. “What was he doin?” the sheriff asked. Just standing there, down below, a good ways off, staring toward our playhouse. And then he went away. “You didn’t see him good enough to tell who he was?” the sheriff persisted. I shook my head and shook it again. “You didn’t think it was maybe Nail Chism?” he suggested.

“What makes you think it was Nail Chism?” I wanted to know.

“You let me ast the questions, gal,” he said sternly. “Did you think it could’ve been him?”

It could’ve been, I allowed.

He asked me to tell him my full name and exactly where I lived, and then he said to me, “Do you understand what awful thing was done to thet pore girl?” I nodded my head, uncertainly because I didn’t know if he meant did I know what rape was or did I understand how awful it had been. Sheriff Snow said, “Iffen I was you, and anybody ast me who done it, I’d tell ’em Nail Chism.” I started to protest, but the sheriff said with conviction, “He was the one who done it, no doubt about it. No doubt whatsoever. He’s already confessed. Now you jist tell ’em he’s the one you saw if anybody asts ye. Hear me?”

They wouldn’t let me see her. Doc Plowright gave her something to calm her down and make her sleep, and she slept a long time. I didn’t get to see her until several days later, when Jim Tom Duckworth drove me in his buggy (with my older sisters Barb and Mandy as chaperones) into Jasper to the courthouse. “Do you gals know what a grand jury is?” Jim Tom asked us. We said we didn’t, although Barb often was ready to claim she knew everything. Jim Tom explained, “This here grand jury aint gonna find nobody guilty, or even innocent neither, as far as that goes. There’s twenty-three of these fellers and they jist sit and listen, as long as it takes, and it aint really a trial, jist a kind of preliminary trial to find out if we have to have us a real trial. I don’t know why they’re called grand, tell ye the honest truth. Aint nothin grand about ’em, they jist sit and listen, and some of ’em fall asleep, and some of ’em are kind of drunk to start with, and they aint a jury at all with the power to decide pore Nail’s fate, they’ll jist see if they think he needs to be in-dited. ‘Indited’ means you aint guilty of nothin, you’ve jist been accused of somethin that maybe you didn’t do. So, Latha, gal, I’d jist ’preciate it iffen ye’d tell those fellers exactly what ye tole me: that you couldn’t tell if it was Nail or not.”

I wasn’t called until late in the afternoon, and, just as Jim Tom had said, by that time many of the so-called grand jurors were already asleep or drunk or just not paying much attention to me. Before my turn came, I got to watch the rest of it. I watched with wonder as my best friend was led into the room, wearing her only good Sunday dress but walking as if it pained her to move, and wincing at every step. I listened with wonder as she told what had happened. And I began to question whether she was capable of giving the performance that it seemed to be. It seemed to me somebody else was speaking through her mouth.

She pointed at me when she said, “I left Latha yonder and started out towards our place, stayin far as I could git away from the woods where we’d seen Nail dist before. But to git to our place, I had to go through this yere kind of thicket of ellum saplins, and there he was! He dist jumped right out at me, and he says, ‘Now, don’t ye holler, or I’ll crack ye on the haid with this yere rock.’ And I seen he had a sharp-pointed rock about this big in one of his hands. He says, ‘Now I tell ye what I want fer ye to do, and ye better do it, or I’ll break yore haid open with this yere rock.’ And he reached in his pants and pulled out his thing, which was this long, and he stuck it straight out at my face and said, ‘Now, Rindy, you better suck on this, and not stop till I tell ye, or I’ll bash in yore haid.’ And I said, ‘Nail Chism, you couldn’t make me suck on that thing if you gave me a million dollars,’ and he said, says, I think he said, ‘You dist better, iffen you know what’s good fer ye,’ and he grabbed my hair and pulled my head up against his thing and tried to get me to open my mouth, but I wouldn’t so he took that rock and tapped me real hard right on top of my haid, I’ve still got the bump right here, see? and it nearly knocked me out and I said ‘Oh!’ and when I said ‘Oh!’ my mouth opened up like this, and he poked that thing right inside and then he commenced running it in and out of my mouth, and I was so dizzy from gittin cracked on the haid I didn’t think to bite him, and he dist kept on jabbin it into my mouth on and on until all of this hot wet stuff come gushin down my goozle…”