Part 21 (2/2)

So he went with them to the station. Viridis had made arrangements to have Rosabone transported on the same train, which would involve two transfers: one at Van Buren, from the Iron Mountain to the Frisco, and another, at Fayetteville, to the Frisco's spur toward Pettigrew. Cyril Monday took the morning off from his job at the bank to see them catch their train.

At the station he drew her apart from Dorinda for a moment to ask, ”You got all the money you need?”

What kind of question was that? For several years now, since her return from Europe, she had not been required to depend upon her father for any a.s.sistance beyond a place to live. ”Enough,” she said.

”Never can tell what emergencies might come up,” he said. ”My daddy always told me, you never know when you might meet some fellow selling two elephants for a nickel.”

She remembered Tom Fletcher's old jokes about elephants in the Ozarks. This time Tom Fletcher hadn't made any jokes, except one, of sorts: if she ever wanted to write a column called ”An Arkansawyer in Stay More,” he had told her, he would pay their usual rate for it. When she had only smiled, not laughed, he had prompted, ”It's nearly as remote as Yokohama to me.” She had told him he ought to visit her there sometime.

She told her father, ”Thank you, Daddy, I've got all I need.”

”Just never can tell,” he said. ”Here,” and he thrust a roll of bills into her hand. ”Put this in your purse and forget about it until you need it.” She tried to protest, but he touched his finger to her lips. ”Better take it now instead of having to ask me for it later, when I might be in a bad mood.”

He had a point there. She put the thick roll of bills into her purse. ”You're sweet,” she said.

”I hope you'll remember me that way,” he requested. And he had one other request: ”Cyrilla wanted me to ask you, she said she couldn't ask you herself, but if it's okay with you and you don't think you'll need it anymore, can she have that studio of yours up in the north tower?”

Viridis raised her eyebrows. ”Does she want to take up art?”

”Sewing. She wants me to buy her a sewing machine.”

Viridis smiled. ”None of y'all expect me to come back, do you?”

”From the looks of it, no,” her father said, and then he moved back to where Dorinda stood, to tell the girl that he had enjoyed having her stay at his house and was sorry they hadn't got better acquainted. He wished her a pleasant trip and good luck and a long and happy life.

”BOART!” hollered the conductor, and the three said their good-byes and exchanged hugs.

Viridis Monday left Little Rock.

Take any day in June in Stay More. School's been out awhile, Mr. Perry the schoolteacher has left town to find a summer job in Harrison, the crops have been planted and are growing, nothing is ready to harvest yet except the snap beans and first spinach, n.o.body is really busy except the men cutting the hay and the timberjacks who keep on logging into ever more remote stands of the white oak forests.

My father never lost a chance to tell us girls that when school let out he expected us to help more on the farm, but every year school let out and he couldn't seem to find enough to keep us busy. He complained to Ma and anybody else who would listen that if he'd only had him just one boy to help around the place, instead of all three of us worthless girls, he might be able to turn the farm into a cash proposition. As it was, he could only raise enough to feed us. We weren't starving, not by any means, but we never had any cash money.

As the youngest of the three unwanted girls, I felt least wanted, so I tried hardest to help out around the place. While Barb and Mandy wouldn't have been caught dead doing a lick of work outside the walls of the house itself, I got myself the job of tending the garden patch. I wouldn't let a weed grow loose in that garden patch, and I spent a good bit of my summer out there in the broiling sun, underneath my sunbonnet but my dress all soaked through with sweat. I was pretty young when I discovered something important about the way the brain works: your thoughts are always better, more interesting, more lively, while you're working than while you're just sitting. I knew that the worst part of Nail Chism's experience in the penitentiary was all the hours he had to do his thinking just sitting or lying around: the thoughts he had in those times must have been drab shades of gray.

Take any day in late June in Stay More and it's apt to be real hot. Generally, I'd try to get my garden work done right after sunup, without even waiting for breakfast. There would still be dew glistening on the vines and sogging the greens. The dog Rouser would trot behind me out to the garden, which wasn't but as far as from here to there the other side of what pa.s.sed for Paw's barn, and Rouser would just sit and watch me, or the morning birds, while I chopped weeds out of the garden. Then he would go with me afterward up in the holler behind our house, just a quarter-mile or so, to the falls. It wasn't really a waterfall; it didn't fall more than maybe five feet from the ledge to the pool; it was more of a cascade than a waterfall, but I called it the falls, and I was the only one in the family who used it. Barb and Mandy drew just enough water from the well to fill an oaken sitz tub about once a week, Sat.u.r.day evening usually before they stepped out, and they'd share that water, Barb first because she was oldest and because she'd drawn the water, and stand, not sitz, in the tub and splash enough to get off the worst dirt and smells. But me, take an early morning in June in Stay More and you'd find me getting wet all over beneath my little waterfall up the holler. No, you'd not; because neither you nor anybody knew where I was, and I was stark naked and only a little bit uncomfortable that Rouser, who was watching me, was a male.

If anybody or anything had come along and spied on me, Rouser would've barked. He never did. And also, I took my .22 rifle with me, just in case. Not that I was afraid, being back up in that dark, mossy, woodsy holler. It was real cool after a couple hours of chopping weeds out of the garden patch, and the water that trickled over that ledge was almost cold.

Of course I never stood under that waterfall when I was having my monthlies. Everybody knew that would be a terrible thing to do, almost suicide. Anybody could tell you of a fool girl or two who had got tuberculosis or a stroke of paralysis from taking a bath at the wrong time of her month.

I have been called superst.i.tious, but I know some things which have never been known to fail. This is not boasting but observation. There are plants that work wonders and always have for thousands of years. I never got chiggerbit, because I knew where the penny-royal grew, and I rubbed it on my legs, and when the chiggers were chewing my sisters alive, they didn't bother me at all. Now, is that superst.i.tion?

Take the common mullein, which some folks call the velvet plant because of its velvety leaves, a shade of green so pale you'd think the plant was worthless. And it is, for most things; cows won't eat it, and although I've heard of some outlandish remedies concocted from the seeds, I've never known one that honestly works. The mullein stalk grows straight up, sometimes as tall as eight or nine feet. The yellow flowers are small and moderately ornamental, and I've known a few folks' yards where they let the mullein grow just for decoration.

In late June the mullein hasn't even started to flower, and at most it's just a few feet high, and inconspicuous, and totally worthless...except for this: if somebody, or something, is lost, you can name a mullein plant after him, her, or it, and then bend the stalk down to the ground. Likely, it will stay bent down. It will surely stay bent down and keep on growing that way if the lost person or the lost thing remains lost. But if that mullein stalk straightens back up, the lost will be found.

This never fails. At least, I have never known it to fail, and I have lost a lot of things: recovered some and never found the others.

Because somebody who has left Stay More is, in a way, ”lost,” the mullein is also good for letting you know if they are ever coming back. When I saw the first mullein of June that was tall enough to bend down, on my hike back up into the holler to my bathing-place, I named it Viridis and bent it down. Not too long after that, another mullein started growing tall right near it. I bent that one down too, after naming it Nail.

Each morning, after two or three sweaty hours in the garden, I would hike up to the waterfall to clean up, and I would pause to notice that both mullein stalks were still bent down. I would greet them and tell them I hoped they would straighten up.

When I had bathed and put on a fresh dress, I would mosey on down into the village and hang around Ingledew's store at the time of morning when everybody was there to get their mail. I never got any mail, except from Viridis. But she never wrote to tell me exactly when she was coming.

The men would sit on the furniture of Ingledew's storeporch like it belonged to them. The women and girls would have to stand around, not on the porch but off to one side, or out in the road, or sometimes inside the store around the dry goods, which was an exciting place to be, especially after Willis Ingledew received a new s.h.i.+pment of bolts of cloth, clean and bright and smooth. Nothing smells better than fresh cloth. But while I enjoyed hanging around the dry-goods department, more often I stood outside off the edge of the porch near enough to the men to listen to their stories or their talk about current events. The main current event now was Nail's escape. How long would it take him to get home? There was no doubt in any man's mind that he was coming home; there were only two questions: how long did it take a feller to walk from Little Rock to Stay More if he was careful not to let himself get seen? and how soon after coming back to Stay More would Nail do something to Sull Jerram?

Every man was of the opinion that Nail would do something to Sull Jerram. If he didn't kill him, he'd mutilate him beyond recognition or something equally terrible, and Sull knew it, and the men who'd been to Jasper lately reported that Sull was...I thought they said ”scared spitless” and figured they meant he was so frightened he couldn't work up enough saliva inside his mouth to take a decent spit, because a man in that predicament was practically unmanned. From my observation, every male human being above the age of twelve or thirteen had to be able to spit at least once every fifteen minutes or he risked being mistaken for a female.

I had to watch where I was standing when I eavesdropped on the porch loungers; I had to be ready to jump to one side quickly.

I told n.o.body about my mullein stalks. You don't ever tell, which would break the magic. n.o.body in Stay More except me, and I suppose the old woman who lived at Jacob Ingledew's (although her house was directly across the road from Willis' store, she hardly ever crossed the road; I never saw her), knew that Viridis might return to Stay More any day now.

One morning in late June on my way to the waterfall after working in the garden, I paused to observe the two mullein stalks and noticed that one of them, the one I'd named Viridis, was behaving like a p.e.c.k.e.r ready for love. I was so excited I could scarcely take time to go on to the falls and take off all my clothes and get real wet. Later, on my way to the store, and at the store itself, I couldn't understand why all the rest of the world, except that mullein stalk, remained so normal and unexcited. It was a typical dull, slow morning in Stay More. The mail wagon came out from Jasper, and Willis Ingledew sorted the mail, and folks saw what they got and read it, or read it for those who couldn't read, and I didn't get anything, but I didn't need anything, because I knew she was coming!

And sure enough, she came! Mullein stalks are never wrong. That very morning, while we were all still there, in or on or around the Ingledew store, the twenty-odd porch regulars loafing in their chairs or on their kegs and keeping the dust of the road down with their spitting, ankle-deep in the shavings from their pocketknives, the children playing in the road without fear of traffic, for there was none, the women mostly inside around the dry goods, and myself leaning up against one of the posts that held up the corner of the porch roof, a slow-moving wagon came into view, coming not from Jasper but from the schoolhouse road that goes westward up the mountain toward Sidehill, Eden, and places beyond. There was an additional horse tied behind the wagon, trotting briskly. I think I recognized that horse, or mare, before I recognized the pa.s.sengers in the wagon. I could tell by her gait. It was Rosabone.

I let out a yell. Everybody turned to stare at me briefly before returning their gazes toward the distantly approaching wagon. To the few who continued staring at me, I explained my outburst: ”It's Viridis. She's here.” Then I started running toward the wagon. I was barefoot, as I always am when the weather's warm, and the gravels of the road bit into my pounding feet, but I scarcely noticed. Rouser chased after me and commenced barking. Other dogs picked up his cry.

So there was a great hubbub as Viridis returned to Stay More. As soon as I started running, others followed me, not all of them running but moving as fast as they could to keep up with me. We didn't give the wagon a chance to arrive and stop at its destination, whatever its destination was: I still don't know whether Viridis had told the driver she wanted to go to Ingledew's store, the old woman's house, my house, or the Chisms', or the Whitters', or where. We stopped her right there in the road. Rindy jumped down from the wagon like she expected a big hug from all of us at once, but it was Viridis I hugged first, and then I hugged Rindy, and the way other people were hugging Viridis, she might have been kinfolks and long lost...or at least the heroine that all of us knew her to be.

Women were exclaiming, ”Did ye ever!” and ”I swan!” and ”Lawsy sakes!” and men were saying, ”I'll be a son of a gun!” and ”Wal, dog my cats!” and ”What d'ye know about that!”

Then all the commotion ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and it was absolutely silent for a time, so quiet you could hear the trees behind Willis' store whispering. Waymon Chism broke the silence by declaring, ”He aint showed up yit.” We all knew who ”he” was.

Viridis had been smiling that great smile that made her mouth look so pretty, but now she frowned and bit her lip. Then she said, ”Well.” That's all that was said for a while by anybody, although they were all looking at one another and exchanging expressions. Then Viridis declared, ”We'll just have to wait for him, won't we?” In response there was a chorus of men's and women's declarations: ”He'll turn up” and ”Give him time” and ”Any day now” and ”Sh.o.r.e as shootin” and ”You bet ye” and ”Sh.o.r.e thang.”

Then came a dozen different offers from a dozen different women, my mother included, for Viridis to stay with them. They were all disappointed that she had already promised to stay, for the time being, at least tonight, with the old woman who lived in the Jacob Ingledew house right yonder. Men fought each other for the privilege of carrying her luggage to that house. Viridis paid the driver, a young man, or just a teenager actually, and thanked him for bringing them all that distance from Pettigrew.

As it turned out, the young driver, whose name was Virgil Tuttle, did not intend to turn around and head back to Pettigrew, not right away. It had taken them a night on the road to cover the distance (they had put up at a sort of hotel in Sidehill), and during the long trip and that night Dorinda had become real friendly with Virgil, or just Virge as she called him, and now he accepted her invitation to stay at least tonight, and maybe longer, at the Whitter cabin, where, before sleeping with two or more of Rindy's brothers, he might be permitted to ”sit up” with her. She was sweet on him, and I could see why: he was sightly and strong, and he could talk the hind foot off a mule.

He drove Rindy and her new suitcase on toward her house, with her mother riding in the back of the wagon to chaperone them, and I hung back to watch Viridis and the old woman at Jacob Ingledew's house greet each other and then disappear inside. One by one the other citizens of Stay More returned to their accustomed places in, on, or around Willis Ingledew's store, or they drifted on home for dinner. I was alone except for Rouser at the foot of the steps leading up to the porch of the big fine house where Viridis was staying with the old woman. I looked at it sadly, disappointed I'd scarcely had a chance to say more than h.e.l.lo to Viridis. But I figured she was tired and also wanted to visit with the old woman, who was her friend, after all, and had just as much claim to her as I did, or more.

But while I was standing there looking at the house, the door opened and Viridis reappeared, coming out on the porch and smiling at me. ”I didn't mean to walk off from you like that,” she said. ”My hostess wants me to ask you if you would have a bite of dinner with us. Will you?”

”Gosh, sure!” was all I could say, and I joined them for dinner in the kitchen of the Jacob Ingledew house. I had never been inside of that house, and I was thrilled. Oh, in the years since then I've seen some finer houses in other places, and looking back I have to think that my world was awfully small that I would consider that house such a palace, when, by comparison with any good city house, it was just a country shack. But to me, then, going inside that house was like stepping into another world.

And both women treated me not as some child eavesdropping on their grown-up conversation but as an equal, almost. I was drawn into their talk as if I really was grown up and had something worth saying and worth listening to. The only times I felt a little left out were when the old woman and Viridis would refer to what had apparently been a lengthy correspondence between them, longer and more continuous than mine with Viridis, One of them would say, ”As I mentioned in my last letter...” or ”You'll recall when I wrote to you in early April...” or ”But you said to me in your letter of May 15th...” and I couldn't help feeling a little jealous. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt I ought to consider myself privileged that such an intelligent and beautiful and heroic woman as Viridis would have bothered to write to me at all, let alone as often and as lengthily as she had. And I got a chance, too, to throw in a couple of expressions like ”Remember what you said to me in that letter about...?”

We talked for most of the afternoon, and I suppose Rouser got tired of waiting for me to come back out of the house, and he went on home by himself. Finally Viridis looked back and forth between the old woman and me and asked the question that she had been putting off. ”You don't suppose he might actually have come back but is hiding and doesn't want anybody to know he's here?”

I thought it was a kind of desperate question, as if she couldn't quite face the possibility that something had happened to keep him from coming home. After all, terrible as it was to contemplate, he could have drowned in the Arkansas River. Or he could have been recaptured, and we wouldn't know about it until the next week's issue of the Jasper newspaper. Or he could have changed his mind about coming home and gone to Colorado.

”Aw,” I said. ”If he was home, he'd of told his folks he was here.”

”But what if,” she asked, ”what if he'd made them promise not to tell anyone else?”

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