Part 28 (1/2)
”It hurt some at first,” I will admit. ”And you were awful impatient. But it was a heap of fun.”
”It was?” He will lift his eyes and search mine.
”Sure was.”
”You got all limp and still, like I'd kilt ye.”
”I reckon I must've just swooned for a bit.”
”Because I was hurtin ye?”
”No, because I'd done went and gone over the mountain.”
His look will tell me that he does not understand and that it would be no use, yet, for me to try to explain it. He will give me that look for a while before changing it to another look with narrowed eyes and a question: ”Would ye lak to do it again?”
I will look around me as if we are being observed, and of course we are, because you, dear reader, will be observing us. In a hushed voice I will say, ”Not right here. Not right now.”
He will laugh. ”I never meant that. I jist meant sometime.”
”Okay,” I will grant. ”Some time. But you ought to know, when we did it before, I was still a little too young to get...to have...to make a baby. I aint, anymore. I could make one now. You ought to know that.”
”We'd have to be real keerful, wouldn't we?” he will allow. I will observe that just the talking about it, just the implication that we might do it again sometime, has given him a noticeable bulging in the fork of his overalls, which I will recognize from having seen on another male just the day before. For a moment I will be possessed of a wild urge to grab his hand and lead him off to the barn, until I recall that I am custodian of twenty-four pots of chicken and dumplings and have not yet decided how I am going to transport even one of them up to the glen of the waterfall. And I will realize that, possessed as I am by this urge, I have not been listening carefully, and that Every has asked me a question.
”What did ye say?” I will ask.
”I ast ye, when?” he will say. ”When can we?”
I am about to reply, when we are interrupted by the arrival of the twenty-fifth bowl of chicken and dumplings. It will come by automobile, the first one to enter our yard in quite a spell. The driver of the car will be a man I haven't seen in quite a longer spell, but I will remember him from his trip to Stay More with the sheriff and Judge Jerram, and I will certainly remember him from his courtroom, where I had to testify. It will be Judge Lincoln Villines, alone again like the time he came to pay a call on Viridis and the old woman.
He will stand in the yard, holding the fancy china serving-dish and looking at me and then at Every. ”Howdy,” he will say, and then squint his eyes at me again. ”You sh.o.r.e are Latha Bourne, aint ye? I seem to recall you from once I seen you afore.” When I nod my head in acknowledgment, he will say, ”I was tole that you was the one could take this yere bowl of victuals up to Nail Chism and his ladyfriend.” When I nod again, taking the bowl from him and setting it among the others, he will glance at Every and say, ”But I don't believe I know you.”
”I was just leavin anyhow,” Every will say, and start shuffling off. ”See you later, Latha,” he will say.
I will be a little put out with Every, that he has taken off like that and left me alone to deal with the judge, who will now watch as Every disappears and turn back to me to ask, ”Your brother?”
”My beau,” I will say.
The judge will snort a laugh but then cover his mouth with his hand. ”Aint you kind of young to carry that bowl way off through the woods to where they're hidin?”
I will point at the hodgepodge of bowls filling the porch. ”No, but I reckon I'm too young to figger out some way to get all them other bowls up to 'em.”
The judge will finally notice the great a.s.sortment of other bowls and look at them like a suitor appraising the crowd of fellow suitors for a lady's hand. ”What's in them?” he will ask.
”Same as what's in yourn,” I will say.
”Chicken'n dumplins?” he will ask.
”Yep,” I will say.
”My, my,” he will say, and will meditate upon the fact, like a suitor discovering that his compet.i.tion is just as strong and handsome and rich as he is. ”News sh.o.r.e travels fast, don't it?” Then he will ask, ”Wal, how air ye figgerin on gittin even one of them bowls up the mountain to 'em?”
”I got two hands, aint I?”
”Yeah, but it's a fur ways off,” he will say. ”Real fur off.”
I will begin wondering how he happens to know just how far off it is. His reference to ”the woods where they are hidin” and ”up the mountain” will indicate to me that he has a pretty good idea of where they are. I will wonder if the news traveling fast has told the whole world not only that Nail Chism has a hankering for some chicken and dumplings but also just where he's hiding. But n.o.body else will know, except me and Doc Swain, who surely will not have told anybody.
It will suddenly dawn on me why, or rather how, Judge Lincoln Villines knows where Nail and Viridis are. But I will pretend ignorance and innocence and will tell him, ”The reason I aint taken any of these bowls up there yet is that I'm not too sure just where it is they're hiding.”
”You're not?” he will say. ”I was tole that you was the only one that knows.”
I will gesture vaguely northward. ”I jist think it's somewheres up yonder.”
He will correct my gesture, pointing properly eastward. ”Naw, it's over yonderways, up that mountain.”
”Could you show me?” I will ask.
”Well, I don't want to go right up to the cave with ye, but I could lead ye part of the ways.”
”As far as where Sull Jerram was shot?” I will ask.
”Sh.o.r.e, I could take ye that-” Abruptly he will stop and change what he's saying to: ”Everbody knows whar that is, don't they?”
”Nossir,” I will tell him. ”Jist me and whoever it was kilt him.”
Will it matter, in the end, who killed Sewell Jerram? I think that what will matter, what will be of any interest to anybody, will be not so much the ident.i.ty of the culprit as, rather, the motive. The reason that Sull Jerram was shot and killed was not because he was about to molest Viridis, not because he had raped and abused Dorinda Whitter, not because he had sent an innocent man to prison, but because he alone knew how much Lincoln Villines had to do with the bootlegging operation that had started the whole thing.
Arkansas has had a number of governors who were less than brilliant, less than capable, less than gubernatorial. George Was.h.i.+ngton Hays himself, despite his corruption, was not without intelligence, was a man who made many mistakes but was at least smart enough to realize when he had made a mistake. In this story Governor Hays will not last much longer, not as governor. In November he will announce that he will not seek reelection. He is intelligent enough to know that he would probably be defeated if he did seek it. Lincoln Villines was not intelligent enough to realize that he could never have been elected to the office even if he had not been stupid enough to get involved in a bootlegging operation.
A professor of political economy at the University of Arkansas, Charles Hillman Brough (the name rhymes with ”tough”), will decide to campaign for the 1916 Democratic nomination for governor, opposing not just Hays, if he chooses to run again, but Hays's entire machine, especially the Jeff Davis faction of the machine, which will appear so eager to hand the nomination to hillbilly Lincoln Villines...until suddenly Villines will not only be revealed to have a shady past but also be suspected of, and then indicted for, murdering a fellow judge, Sewell Jerram, who had threatened to expose that shady past.
The scandal will shake the Democratic Party but not to the extent of preventing its nominee, Brough, from swamping the Republican and Socialist nominees in the general election, by almost a hundred thousand votes.
As one of his last acts in office, as the very last of a long string of sometimes questionable pardons, Governor Hays will grant a pardon to Lincoln Villines, then under a relatively light sentence of ten years, a Newton County jury having convicted him not of murder, reasoning that it isn't murder to do away with a bad man, but of ”voluntary manslaughter,” as the foreman attempted to cla.s.sify it.
Governor Hays in retirement will keep a law office in Little Rock and will publish a number of articles in national publications, arguing his continued advocacy of capital punishment as the only alternative to mob violence. During Prohibition and the Jazz Age he will remain a staunch supporter of Alfred Smith as the Democrats' candidate for president, because, he will point out, ”It was the Republican Party that tried to force the social equality of the Negro upon the Aryan people of the South.” But Hays will not live to see Smith win Arkansas while losing most of the South and the election. Hays will die as another advocate of Aryan supremacy, an Austrian named Schicklgruber, is rising to power in Germany.