Part 25 (2/2)

He fell into it, that pile of blankets, quilts, comforters, and pillows, topped, as he had known it would be, with fresh white sheets, but he forgot to grope around for the fresh white sheet of paper with her handwriting on it that would tell him there was a harmonica beneath the bedpile; nor did he think to grope for the harmonica and play it all night. Nor did he think to notice even if it was night or day. His eyes closed as soon as he hit the bedpile, and he spread his arms to embrace the bedpile, and his overworked imagination failed him and dropped him into a deep, deep slumber.

I was on my way to my own little waterfall when I spotted the mullein stalk standing upright. Looking back, it is a wonder how I managed to keep on going to my destination. My first impulse was to fetch Viridis immediately with the news that the mullein stalk was up! But two things stopped me: First, I really needed that bath; it was an exceptionally hot morning, and I'd sweated more than a girl should, and I wasn't about to go off to meet my hero with garden dirt on my face and dried sweat all down my sides. And second, I could just see myself hollering, ”Viridis! Viridis! The mullein has risen!” and her saying, ”The what?” and me trying to explain and even forgetting an important fact: you can't tell anyone about the magic of the mullein, or it's sure to spoil the magic. If I told Viridis, or anyone, that the mullein had announced the safe return of Nail Chism to Stay More, provided they didn't think I was crazy or just a silly, superst.i.tious girl, I might be embarra.s.sed to discover that my act of telling had wiped out the act of his coming.

So I did two things: I went on up the holler and calmly took my bath...well, maybe not calmly, but deliberately enough to make sure that I got thoroughly washed off from head to toe, and even washed my hair, which would mostly dry in the suns.h.i.+ne before I could get home and brush it. And then I went on up to the glen of the waterfall alone, or alone except for Rouser, whom I couldn't persuade to sit or stay. I even paused at the house, before trying to persuade him to sit or stay, to change from my faded gingham dress into my better blue calico, and then to brush my hair as best I could to get most of the kinks out. I thought of maybe a little rouge but decided against it. I did powder my nose, although it would become unpowdered again by the time I got to the glen of the waterfall. I wanted to wear my good shoes, but it was a long hike, so I made up my mind to wear my ugly working-shoes and take them off before I got there.

”Where you goin in that dress?” my mother yelled as I was sneaking out the front door. ”This aint Sunday, you fool.”

If she'd been more civil, I would have answered her. Instead, I kept on going, and told Rouser to sit, but he wouldn't. I told him to stay, but he wouldn't. I nearly took a stick to him.

Finally I just tried to ignore him, and he followed me all the way up the mountain to Nail's old sheep pastures, and across them to the forest, and through the cool, dark forest to the bright glen of the waterfall. I kept telling myself that all I wanted to do was find out if my mullein had been lying to me. There are, after all, a few known instances when superst.i.tions didn't do a bit of good, they only made you feel better or they out and out refused to cooperate, for some perverse reason of their own. It was just possible that my mullein stalk had mistaken Nail for somebody else, or else was a botanical freak that couldn't stop growing straight anyhow. If by some small chance the mullein stalk had lied, I would be the first one to know it, and the last and only one to know it, and then I was going to tromp the heck out of that mullein and start over with a fresh one. If, as I devoutly believed, my mullein stalk was being honest and trustworthy, I intended to summon Viridis immediately and tell her that by accident I'd discovered that Nail was back. Well, of course I'd have to say howdy to him before I ran back to the village. I couldn't just sneak up and make sure it was him and then run like the d.i.c.kens.

These were the thoughts that were running through my head while I hiked as fast as my legs would carry me. But there was another thought too, and I'm not ashamed to admit it: I had a kind of proprietary interest in Nail Chism. From the moment the whole trouble had started, a year before, I'd scarcely gone a day without thinking about him. I wanted him to be okay. I wanted him to escape the prison, as he had done, and I wanted him to make it safely back home, and I wanted him to live happily ever after. Sure, I wanted him, period. But that was something else. I knew Viridis deserved him a thousand times more than I did, and I knew she was going to have him, and I knew they were going to live so happily ever after that it would be like a fairy tale, and I knew in my bones that ever after was about ready to begin. But for a little while, just a little while, he was mine.

Yes, I took off my ugly shoes before reaching the glen of the waterfall and walked the last hundred yards barefoot and stopped where the water was still in a pool, away from the plunge of the falls, to look down into it and see my reflection: my face was red, not from any rouge, and both hands could not arrange my black hair the way I wanted it, but at least I had on my best dress, and a strand of artificial amber beads around my neck. I wasn't beautiful like Viridis, but I wasn't ordinary either.

In the mouth of the cavern, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the first thing I saw was the rifle. A .22, lying on top of a big wad of black fur: the skin of a bear, I figured out. Neither the rifle nor the bearskin was among the items that Viridis and I had steadily been furnis.h.i.+ng the cavern with. Viridis had considered leaving the Smith & Wesson revolver in the cavern but had decided to keep it with her, for her own protection. She had left no firearm here, or at least she hadn't told me about any firearm, and she told me virtually everything.

And then I saw him. I knew it was him, and yet I was afraid. Who else could it have been? Since that last time in court I'd nearly forgotten what he looked like, except for his body: no man of my acquaintance, then or after, ever had a body as splendidly put together and held together as Nail Chism did, all the parts of it in perfect shape and accord. The body was sprawled out face up on the bed that Viridis and I had prepared for him. His eyes were closed, and I had to study his chest for a long time to determine that it was slightly moving with his breathing. He was not dead. But he was sound asleep at full day, nine o'clock in the morning. I'd expected to see him in prison clothes, something of which I had only a vague idea, zebra stripes and such, nothing like what he was actually wearing: just a man's light-blue chambray s.h.i.+rt, some gray cotton trousers, a pair of boots that didn't look like he'd hiked all the way from Little Rock in them, and a felt fedora hat, fallen upside down behind his head as if he'd dropped to the bed without bothering to take it off.

I resisted the impulse to shake him and see if he would awaken. I sat cross-legged on the floor of the cavern near him and studied him and felt a wild mixture of feelings: exultation that he was home, pride in my mullein stalk for being accurate and straight-up-and-down, admiration for his rugged and battered but beautiful features (the blond hair was growing back rapidly), befuddlement at his deep slumber in broad daylight, and, most of all, growing certainty that he was the one who had killed Sull Jerram. I didn't understand why my mullein stalk had not announced his return on the same day that Sull Jerram was killed, but the ways of mullein are as mysterious as they are magic and infallible, when they're not just being ornery.

I had to get Viridis, and yet I could not. First I had to see if he would wake, and let him know that everything was all right and that I would fetch Viridis right away. I wanted to somehow thank him for accepting my suggestion that the glen of the waterfall would make a good hiding-place. I wanted him to know that I'd helped put all of these things in the cavern for him, which, I saw by looking around me, he hadn't yet used: the cans of corned beef and beans and such were unopened, the pocketknife with can opener attachment untouched, the bar of soap still wrapped, the yards of mosquito netting neatly folded up, the hunting-knife still sheathed. He had not disturbed any of these things...except, I noticed, the harmonica, which now lay on top of the pile of bedclothes, near his open hand, as if he had held it and maybe even played on it but let it drop.

For the rest of the morning I stayed with him, waiting for him to wake. It must have been getting on toward noon. Rouser had wandered off after giving a good long sniff to the bearskin and to Nail's body. Maybe Rouser had gone back home; he wasn't all that faithful. I was getting hungry, and thought of opening a can of something to eat, but the sound of the can opener might wake him, so I waited. I felt like an intruder, in a way. I was invading Nail's privacy, or the privacy of his sleep: in sleep the body does things to us that we don't know about but wouldn't want to share with anyone else: in sleep Nail's most private part distended and bulged mightily within his trousers, and fascinated me but reddened me all over with embarra.s.sment or guilt at watching or...yes, reddened me with a kind of l.u.s.t. I was not, for going on three years now, a virgin, and I knew the meaning of that thickening and extension inside his pants, but I had never actually observed it, even if my observation now was impeded by the covering of his trousers. I knew it could happen in dreams: sometimes I'd seen Rouser asleep, when he wasn't chasing rabbits in his dreams, chasing some imaginary b.i.t.c.h and letting his pink thing swell and pop out of its furry sheath and drool. I wondered if Nail was dreaming about Viridis, even dreaming about something he'd never done, because, to the best of my knowledge at that time, in twenty-seven years he had never succeeded in doing what I had done nearly three years before, when I was only eleven. While studying him, I amused myself by imagining that I was reaching out and unb.u.t.toning the fly of his trousers and liberating from the prison of its clothes that big convict.

This daydream was so real and diverting that I was shocked to realize his eyes were open and looking at me as if I had actually done it. Or maybe in my l.u.s.t I really had done it while thinking it was only a daydream. One of his big hands abruptly covered his groin. He stared at me and began to tremble. Was he afraid of me?

I was smiling as big as I could, but also frowning, at his trembling. ”Howdy, Nail,” I said. ”It's just me, Latha.”

”Where am I?” he asked.

”You made it!” I said. ”But are you all right?”

”I reckon not,” he said. ”I must be real bad sick, 'cause I don't have the least idee how I managed to git here.”

I reached out and put my hand on his forehead. At the real touch of his skin I knew that I had only imagined touching him down below. Reality is always more touchable than imagination. ”You're real cold,” I said. ”Cold as death.”

”Yeah, I've been either too cold or too hot or too wet for quite a spell.” His words came out almost like stuttering, because of the chattering of his teeth and the trembling of his body.

I drew a blanket up over him. And then another one. And yet another one. And then a quilt. I draped and tucked more covers over him than I'd ever had myself the coldest winter night of my life, and still he shook so mightily that I thought he'd pop right out of the bed. I couldn't understand how anybody could be so cold on such a hot morning. Well, it was cooler in the cavern than out in the suns.h.i.+ne, but not all that cool. I touched my own brow, and I felt normal; no, I felt a good bit hotter than normal. I considered that his conscience might be giving him a nervous chill: that he had killed a man and now feared the consequences. But n.o.body ever shook like that simply from guilt or fear. He was, I understood, sick. I wanted to run and fetch not Viridis but Doc Swain, but I was afraid that Nail would shake himself to death and freeze while I was gone.

So, almost without thinking, I did what I did: I climbed beneath the covers with him and held him tight, trying to warm him with the heat, the plenty of it, from my own body. The thick quilts and blankets piled atop us imprisoned my body heat and divided it with him, but that was not enough for both of us: I became cold myself. Together we trembled for a long time. We didn't have our arms around each other, not all four arms anyhow, but we had our bodies pressed as hard together as they could get, and that big bulge down there in his pants had never gone away, and my mind was filled with wild thoughts and fear and chill and l.u.s.t and everything.

Then we were not side by side, exactly. In an effort to still his shaking, I had pressed down on him, mashed him to his back, and I lay hard atop him, the whole length of him, mas.h.i.+ng down, and then he did have both arms around me, around my back and my waist both, holding me tight to him. We squirmed and shook and squeezed in that position for so long that somehow the bulge in his britches worked itself directly beneath the juncture of my thighs so that our most private places were not just touching but mas.h.i.+ng very hard and rubbing harder, and before I knew it I had begun a different kind of shaking, not of nervousness or chill but of fulfillment of the exertion and labor of love. I cried out. Maybe, even, I pa.s.sed out, because the next thing I was aware of, and it seemed time had gone by, he was no longer trembling at all. He was perfectly still, except for his breathing, and he had thrown the covers off us, and I wondered if the weight of all of me on top of him was mas.h.i.+ng him uncomfortably, but he didn't seem to mind, and I didn't want to move from that position just yet, because I knew that once I did, I would never find myself like that with him, ever again.

At last I rolled off and lay there beside him, not touching him anymore, giving him up to whoever would claim him that he belonged to. I just looked at him, with love but also with a little wondering: had he maybe just faked his shaking in order to get me to do what I'd done? Because he wasn't shaking the least bit anymore. He was smiling, and I know it was just a smile of being friendly and maybe a little embarra.s.sed, but it also seemed like a smile of having tricked me into that enjoyment.

Then he said, ”You went over the mountain.”

”Yeah,” I said, as if to let him know that I knew what he meant saying that. ”I got over the mountain.”

”You're not Viridis,” he said, as if he'd just noticed.

I had to laugh. ”I wish I was,” I said. ”I sure truly wish I really was. But don't you even know me?”

He smiled again. ”Some ways, you're better than Viridis,” he said.

”What ways?” I wanted to know.

”You're home folks,” he said. ”You wrote and told me about this hideaway. And I do honestly mis...o...b.. that she'd have warmed me up the way you jist now did. Or gone over the mountain.”

”Aw, I had to climb that mountain,” I said.

”I know you did,” he said. ”I sh.o.r.e appreciate it, what-all you've done.”

”You're not shakin no more,” I observed.

”No, you see, Latha, I've got the two-day ague, and the way it works is, I shake like crazy for an hour, and then I'm burnin up, like I am right now, for another little spell, and then I commence to sweat like a stud horse-'scuse me, Latha-I get soppin wet for a time, and then I'm okay for another twenty-four hours, and it hits me again the next day.”

”I've never had that,” I declared, ”but I've heard of it. You've done been skeeterbit.”

”Yeah, that's what causes it,” he said. ”Skeeters.”

”You'd best let me run and fetch Doc Swain,” I told him. ”And of course Viridis too. She'd be real mad at me if she knew I'd come up here by myself.”

”You don't have to tell her nothin,” he told me.

”I'll make up a story,” I said. ”I'm pretty good at that, don't you know?”

”I reckon,” he said.

I stood up and straightened my dress and patted my hair into place. ”Can I get you anything 'fore I go? A drink of water? Anything to eat?”

”Just maybe a sip of water is all, right now,” he said, lying there in the pain of his high fever.

”And we'd better hide that .22 before Doc Swain sees it,” I announced, and tried to think of a safe place to hide it.

”How come?” Nail wanted to know.

”How come? Well, his dad is still justice of the peace, don't you know, and they've already been up here checkin when they came to get Sull's body, so naturally Doc would put two and two together and know it was you.” Nail just stared at me as if he hadn't the faintest idea what I was talking about, and I began to wonder if maybe he really didn't. ”That is your rifle yonder, aint it?” I asked.

”Yeah,” he said.

”How long have you been here? What day did you get here?”

He shook his head. ”I honestly aint got the foggiest notion.” Then he asked, ”What did you say about Sull's body?”

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