Part 8 (1/2)

”I talked to everyone, Nail.”

”Everyone? That's an awful lot of people.”

Their allotted time was running out. She opened her purse and took out the bundle of pages and peeled off the top sheet. ”Let me read the beginning,” she said, and read: ”'To His Excellency Governor George W. Hays. We, the undersigned, residents and voters of Newton County, Arkansas, do hereby solemnly pet.i.tion Your Excellency to consider the sentence of death under which our friend, Nail Chism, has been placed, wrongly we feel. We each and severally believe him to be innocent of the crime of which he was charged, and we humbly entreat Your Excellency to wield your authority to pardon him, or at least to commute the sentence of death.'”

Viridis held up the many sheets so that Nail could see the signatures. ”There are 2,806 names here, in all,” she said. ”Of course, many of them are just X's, but in each case where the person was unable to write his or her name, I have filled it in beside the X. See?” She held up page after page for his scrutiny.

Nail peered at the sheets as closely as the screen would allow. ”I declare, you've got everbody on there!” he exclaimed. And she did, and she knew it: people from all over Newton County but particularly the Stay Morons: all the Ingledews, Duckworths, Plowrights, Swains, Coes, Chisms, Bullens, Bournes, Murrisons, Cluleys, Dinsmores, Kimbers...yes, even the Whitters. Of course all of the names were male; a voteless woman's name carried no weight with the governor. But there was one female name, and Viridis held her forefinger on it and said, ”Now, here's an X, but beside it there's an attempt to spell out the name. Can you make out the letters?”

Nail slowly read and spoke each letter. ”D,” he said. ”O, and R, and I, and N, and-” He stopped, he looked up at Viridis, and his eyes were questioning so that what he said next sounded almost like a question but was actually a statement, just whispered: ”It's her.”

Viridis nodded. ”Now, listen, Nail. Our time is almost up. I'm going to go home and try to write you some of the things that I don't have time to tell you, and I'll get Farrell Cobb to bring you the letter within a week. There's so much I have to tell you about my trip to Stay More. I have to tell you about Judge Jerram...”

”Don't tell me you met him too?”

”I had some very unpleasant encounters with Judge Sull Jerram. I'll tell you about it. I've got so many things to tell you, but for now our time has run out.”

”h.e.l.l,” Nail said. ”They ought to give us thirty minutes, on account of I didn't get any visit time during January. I'm owed twice as much, aren't I?”

”You certainly are,” she said. ”But I can have only half of it. I've talked to Mr. Fancher-the one you call Short Leg-and he says that you can have another fifteen minutes for the time you didn't have in January.” She smiled. ”But not with me. There's someone else here waiting to see you. I've got to go. I'll be your first visitor for March. Good-bye for now, Nail. Take care, and promise me you'll try to eat whatever they give you.”

”Who-? What-? Hey!” Nail protested, but before he could say anything else, she got herself out of there. In the anteroom she gave a sigh both of relief at getting out on time, in fifteen minutes, and of disappointment at not having been able to talk to him more.

Then she turned to the bench where the girl was sitting. ”All right, Dorinda,” she said. ”You be a good girl and get yourself on in there.”

Off.

Off she had gone to Stay More, in the middle of the winter, and we had met. To me, at first, she had been simply that stranger-lady everybody was already talking about so much that the gossip reached me before she did. The first I had ever heard of Viridis Monday was Bertha Kimber telling my mother, ”Ay-law, Fannie, they's a womarn a-stayin down to the Ingledew big house and done rid her mare plumb from Little Rock!”

But Viridis did not ride the mare all the way from Little Rock, which would have taken forever even if she and the horse both had not frozen to death. No, she put the mare on a train, and they rode the train for most of the way, and she rode the mare only the last sixty miles or so of the trip...but that is getting ahead of the story.

Tom Fletcher did not want her to do it. The Gazette's managing editor tried not just once but on several occasions through December and January to dissuade Viridis from making the trip. When it became obvious to him that she would not be discouraged by the weather reports, deterred by horrendous descriptions of the Newton County terrain and roads (or lack of them), daunted by the obvious futility of the mission (Fletcher himself, he later confessed to her, had done some checking and sent a couple of seasoned statehouse reporters out to gather the facts and determine that Nail Chism was guilty, and that unless and until Arkansas joined the other states that had abolished the death penalty for rape there was not going to be any way to get the sentence commuted), diverted by a more interesting a.s.signment (he offered to let her cover the legislature's debate on whether or not Arkansas would go totally dry)-only then did he attempt to kid her out of the ”mission” by making it seem an adventure into terra incognita: She would need, he said, to hire some guides, and an interpreter, and a band of bearers. She would need an English-Ozarkian dictionary and phrasebook. She would have to get herself a racc.o.o.n coat and a c.o.o.nskin cap and carry an elephant gun. As a joke, Tom Fletcher had the boys down in the pressroom print up a mock article, ”Elephants in the Ozarks,” which he left on her desk.

When it became clear to him (and he was a wise man as well as a practical joker) that nothing would stop her from going to Stay More, he called her to his desk and sat her down and apologized for having belittled her plan, and announced that he had given it some serious thought and decided not only to let her go but to take her himself. If she could just wait until early March when it warmed up a bit, he could get a few days off and borrow a Columbia touring car, which would get the two of them up there and back to Little Rock in no time. He had checked the route as far as Jasper, where, he knew, there was a fair hotel called the Buckhorn they could put up at. Separate rooms, of course, he added, and winked.

Viridis liked Tom Fletcher quite a lot, but she did not like the idea of waiting until March, or of having her own investigation paced and directed by her boss. If it was all the same to him, she said, she'd appreciate having her total independence.

When the time of her furlough from the Gazette approached, he called her to his desk again and laid out before her the timetables of the railroads. She could take the St. Louis & Iron Mountain train westbound as far as Van Buren, transfer there (after a night's layover at a fair hotel) to a St. Louis & San Francisco (or ”Frisco”) train, which would take her north to Fayetteville, or, rather, to Fayette Junction, the terminus of the Frisco's spur eastward to Pettigrew, where, after a night (at a fair hotel), she could hire a driver and buggy to take her over the mountains a day's ride (or a day and a half, at most) to Stay More. She ought to be able to make the whole trip, there and back, in a week.

Viridis thanked Tom Fletcher for his concern and his help, but she had already planned her itinerary, and her modus operandi. She intended to put her own Arabian mare aboard the Iron Mountain train, which she would ride only as far as Clarksville, then alight there and ride the mare northward for two days until she reached Stay More.

Tom Fletcher consulted his maps and tables. ”But there aren't any fair hotels in that wilderness,” he said. ”And you're not going to camp out under the stars in this weather.”

She smiled and told him she would manage, without any camping out. She was not taking a bedroll or any equipment other than a spare blanket for extra warmth if she needed it, and a heavy horse blanket for her mare. Her saddlebags-and she was using an American western saddle, not an English riding-saddle-would contain only her changes of clothing, one dress neatly folded, spare jodhpurs, extra shoes, her writing-pads, pencils, and her sketchbooks and drawing-supplies.

”Aren't you going to be armed?” Tom Fletcher asked, and when she showed him the derringer she kept in her purse, he laughed and said it might deter human molesters but wouldn't work against an elephant...or, okay, there weren't any of those, but there were real wolves, bears, and panthers. He persuaded her to accept the loan of a Smith & Wesson revolver, which, he said, would not kill wolves, bears, or panthers but would certainly intimidate them. Since, he warned, facility in the use of a revolver is not easily acquired, he offered to give her some lessons. ”Let's climb into my Ford and drive over to Big Rock and shoot bottles.”

That was their first ”date.” Emboldened, a day later he asked her to dinner. Tom Fletcher was a thirty-two-year-old bachelor possessed of a strong, handsome face despite overly bulging eyeb.a.l.l.s, and, as we've noted, wisdom and humor. He was a first cousin of a Little Rock literary light, then living in England, named John Gould Fletcher, who would later acquire a reputation as one of the Imagist poets. At dinner, in the restaurant of the Capital Hotel, Tom made one last effort to talk Viridis out of her ”quixotical quest.” Failing, he declared, ”I'm awfully fond of you, Very, and if anything happened to you, I'd kill myself.”

Nothing, really, happened to her, except for a couple of scares. She had the time of her life. Even her horse seemed enlivened by the adventure. The mare, which she'd owned now for nearly a year, was a grandniece of Gericault, her jumping horse of old, and although Viridis did not jump her a lot, she was capable of it. Viridis had named her after a famous French woman painter of the last century who had specialized in horses, Rosa Bonheur, but Viridis had shortened this to the playful ”Rosabone,” to which the mare responded. Before her sudden interest in Nail Chism, Viridis spoke only to Rosabone. Tom Fletcher pointed out to her the similarity between ”Rosabone” and ”Rocinante,” the wretched horse of Don Quixote.

Rosabone did not balk at being loaded onto a cattle car of the Iron Mountain train; it was an enclosed car, albeit an unheated one, and Viridis draped her liberally with a thick horse blanket. Then Viridis settled down in the pa.s.senger car to watch as the train maneuvered the Baring Cross bridge over the Arkansas River into Argenta. The stations they pa.s.sed, or at which they briefly took on mail or an occasional pa.s.senger, on the way to Conway-Amboy, Marche, Wilder, Palarm, Mayflower, Gold Creek-were the same little jerkwaters and whistlestops she'd pa.s.sed through twice every weekend during her semester's attendance at Conway Central College and Conservatory of Fine Arts, and the sight of those familiar, almost identical cl.u.s.ters of wooden false-fronted stores and the little railroad depots brought back to her the impoverishment of her collegiate experience. She had come so far since those days, and yet, going back again now, especially as the train pulled in and stopped for a while at Conway, within sight of her old campus, she felt as if she were recapturing something she had lost, or getting another opportunity to do something she had neglected, the first time around.

Conway had really been the limit of her penetration into the Arkansas hinterland, and now, as the train left it and gathered speed to the northwest and the uplands, which she could see already in the distance, she felt that she was going to explore some recesses of her native state that she had not known before. The train followed a generally westward course paralleling the Arkansas River and pa.s.sing through towns, some of good size, that seemed to have been created by the railroad and had avenues flanking the tracks, and new business buildings: drugstores, hardware stores, furniture stores, even a small theater or two. Pa.s.sing through Atkins, she had a clear view of the new brick facade of the J.M. Maus Company, a two-story block that was more like a Little Rock department store than a backwoods general emporium. To one side of the store the wagons of trappers were unloading their contents of furs, fox and possum skins, to be traded for merchandise. The people, especially the men, did not exhibit any pretense or cultivation in their appearance; they were an antic.i.p.ation of the roughcast yeomen she would encounter in Newton County.

She rode into the sunset at Russellville, and thereafter the little stations the train pa.s.sed were illuminated only by single lights over their depot signs: Ouita, Mill Creek, London, Scotia, Piney. There are so many little towns out there, she reflected, and so many little lives, all of them strange to me. There are two aspects of travel by rail that she was acutely aware of: one is the sense of ”out-thereness,” of all that lies on both sides of this pa.s.sage; and the other is of this pa.s.sage itself, this channel, this extended tube through which one is pa.s.sed, with a beginning and an end.

She broke free in the middle. Halfway between Conway and Fort Smith, at Clarksville, she left this tube and entered the out-there. After a night at the St. James Hotel, where she sheltered Rosabone in the hotel's horse-barn, and after a good early breakfast of oats for the mare and oatmeal for the rider, they struck out northward along a winding road pointing toward the mountains. The morning was very cold but clear, the air bracing. Viridis let Rosabone set her own pace, with an occasional run on the downslope of hills. Horse and rider had not gone more than a few miles, as far as Ludwig, before they encountered the first signs of astonishment in bystanders or other riders. The other riders were all male, and they had to look twice to see that she was not, and then, if there were two or more of them, they had to do a lot of talking among themselves about this exceptional circ.u.mstance of a lone woman in pants riding astraddle. Yard dogs who ordinarily would have chased a pa.s.sing horse for a while ran out and took one sniff and gave her a tilted-head look. Women stood with their hands on their hips and their mouths open.

But there were not a lot of people. North of Harmony, which she reached at midmorning (and paused to admire the quaint stone church there), the fields gave way mostly to forests, with only an occasional farm before she reached the village of Ozone. How did she know, and later tell me, these names of towns-Ludwig, Harmony, Ozone? (There were no road signs in those days.) Because, in every village she pa.s.sed, she stopped to ask someone, just to be sure she was on the right road to Newton County. In the case of the last place, she said, ”Ozone? That's an unusual name. Is it because of the quality of the air?” The air there, as elsewhere in the Ozarks, was sweet and clear and heady. ”Couldn't rightly tell ye, ma'am,” the man said. ”Hit's jist been called thet, fur back as I can recall.”

When, shortly after dark, at the top of a steep climb up Moon Hull Mountain, she reached a village that had a hotel, or something resembling one, although the simple sign said only hotell, and inquired of the village's name, a man told her it was called Loafer's Glory. Which indeed was its name (I had been there once with my mother, who had an aunt living there; it was the farthest I'd ever been from home), but officially, as far as the United States Post Office Department was concerned, an inst.i.tution that often made unfeeling mistakes, as I would come to learn to my sorrow, the place was named Fallsville, which it is still called on maps, at least those few maps which show it. There's nothing wrong with ”Fallsville,” and there was, as Viridis discovered the next morning, a pretty waterfall in the headwaters of the Mulberry River, but Loafer's Glory is a fine name for a town, almost as fine as Stay More. The Dixons, Bowens, Habbards, Rykers, Cowans, Durhams, and Sutherlands did as much loafing in their village as the folks in ours did of staying, which is to say, for as long as they could, until neither loafing nor staying was any longer possible or glorious.

Loafer's Glory is down in the southwest corner of Newton County, but Viridis didn't realize she had already reached the county of her destination. She still had a hard day's ride to go to reach Stay More. She and Rosabone needed a good night's rest, which the ”Hotell,” Sutherland's, provided. It was like no hotel she had been in before: two guest rooms upstairs sharing a common washstand, her room just large enough for an old-fas.h.i.+oned iron bedstead with a cornshuck mattress and a pair of light down quilts over it. The occupant of the other room was a traveling ”drummer,” or salesman, for a wholesale grocery outfit in Fayetteville. He tried to get friendly. He suggested to Viridis that they might get warmed up with a little peach brandy he had with him, but she declined, saying she'd had a hard ride today and expected a harder one tomorrow. She got up in the morning before he did and beat him to the washstand, and was finished with her breakfast before he came downstairs.

There is a Y in the main road at Loafer's Glory, and the left fork would have taken her into Madison County and toward Pettigrew, which Tom Fletcher had suggested as the terminus of her rail ride, but she took the right fork eastward toward Swain and Nail, a village named for the maternal grandfather of Viridis' obsession. She did not know this then, but she reached it in midafternoon, and, inquiring the distance and direction to Stay More (for it was here she would have to turn north again), was told that it was only six miles, but six rough, crooked, uphill miles, and she wouldn't be able to make it before dark.

She should have spent the night in Nail. Although the village had no hotel, or anything approximating one, any villager would have shown her hospitality and could probably have regaled her with stories about Jethro Nail, that maternal grandfather, from whom the hero of this story acquired a large measure of his sense of humor as well as his sense of injustice. But, so close to her destination, Viridis was eager to get on.

She would discover that Stay More had no hotel, or anything approximating one either...when she reached it. The reaching was hard. Of the whole journey from Clarksville, of her entire experience with bridle paths and trails and roads, those last six miles were the hardest. Indeed, that road from Nail to Stay More no longer exists today; it was the first road to be given back to the forest when the Ozark National Forest was set up; the southern entrance to, or egress from, Stay More has been closed off ever since. You could almost say that Viridis found a place you can no longer get to. Or, at least, that she used a path that can no longer be traversed. Or even that both place and path existed only in the creation of her fancy at that specific circ.u.mstance of time.

There were stretches where she had to get down and lead Rosabone. Places where Rosabone stumbled in the snow. Places where Viridis, down and walking, stumbled in the snow. Rosabone was getting very tired. It was growing dark, the forest canopy was obscuring what sky light there was, and Rosabone could not understand why they weren't stopping if it was dark. Viridis tried to talk to her, but she was talking to herself, whistling in the dark, afraid. Once, as both she and Rosabone stood panting at the top of some defile they'd climbed, surrounded by huge boulders and enormous trees, she heard a noise, as of branches snapping, which caused her to fetch the revolver Tom Fletcher had lent her and make sure it was loaded, and to walk on for a while with the revolver in one hand and the mare's reins in the other. She emerged into a clearing, dimly lit but still with enough light for her to witness the sudden spectacle of a huge bird swooping down and seizing a rabbit. She could not tell what sort of bird it was-eagle, hawk, falcon-but she could clearly identify the big white rabbit, who, strangely, she thought, made no protest or sound of any sort as the talons of the raptor lifted it off the ground and carried it ever higher out across the treetops and over the valley.

She moved on until she could see that valley, then stood looking into it for a very long while, resting, letting Rosabone rest. The last strips of the sunlit sky sank beyond the westward mountains. The moon rose, and it was full, and every star was there. The northern slopes of hills that she faced still were covered with snow, against which the black trunks and branches of trees made a vast and intricate tracery. The snow, in this light, seemed more blue than white, and everything was silent and still. One by one, far down below, people here and there lit their kerosene lanterns, and the pinpoints of light scattered across the valley forewarned Viridis of the number of people she must encounter before her mission would be accomplished. The whole scene reminded her of a village landscape at night as painted by van Gogh, although he had seen the moon and the stars far more pa.s.sionately than she could now feel. ”Well, Rosabone,” Viridis said, as she remounted the mare, ”that is the end of our journey.”

It was downhill from there on. When she reached the village, it was full dark, but the great moon and a few kerosene lanterns in windows gave some illumination to the buildings along Stay More's main street. Weeks after she had left Stay More, the next time the moon was full, I walked through the village one night attempting to see it as she had first laid eyes on it. Of course I knew each building, each house, and each store in a way that she did not: I recognized the dark, looming shape of Isaac Ingledew's gristmill, closed then because the Chism moons.h.i.+ning operation had used up all the cornmeal; another large building, whose triangular gable rose three floors up, I knew, pretending to be Viridis, would be one of my objectives: Willis Ingledew's General Store, where the men who would testify for Nail Chism congregated nearly every day, winter or summer; pretending to ride my horse on up the street, as she had, I pa.s.sed between the two doctors' clinics, on my left old Doc Plowright's board-and-batten wooden shack with false front, he who had examined Rindy Whitter, and on my right across the street the new clinic of Plowright's only compet.i.tion, young Doc Colvin Swain, a Stay More boy, just out of his training in St. Louis. The next building up from Doc Swain's was our princ.i.p.al business building, the ashlar stone Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company. I stood where Viridis had stopped her horse to stare at it, and then, as she had done, I let my eyes s.h.i.+ft northward across the Right p.r.o.ng Road (which she would take to get to my house as well as to the Chism place) to the only other general store on that stretch of main road, T.L. Jerram's, run by Sull's brother Tilbert. I must have stared at that one a little longer than she had, although then I couldn't even guess that one day I would own it and live there and have the post office in it, and that even at this present time my granddaughter Sharon would be living there still.

Viridis looked at what wouldn't become Latha Bourne's General Store and Post Office until June of 1932; there were lights of kerosene lanterns burning within the two wings of the store that were living quarters, and she was tempted to stop there first, just to ask for directions. It would have been ironic to ask Tilbert Jerram for help in the beginning of what would become her fight against his brother. But she did not. She turned Rosabone around and began to ride slowly back down Main Street. There were lights burning at Doc Plowright's, but I don't blame her for having a sense, even then, that he wouldn't be very sociable. Across the road she could see through the window of Doc Swain's, where Colvin was sitting at a table peering through a microscope, and something about that-and the moonlit s.h.i.+ngle hanging out front: C.U. SWAIN, M.D., doctor of human medicine-convinced her that he was a very busy young man who wouldn't take kindly to an interruption. She only wanted to ask for directions.

Didn't dogs bark at her? When I attempted to retrace her movements through the village and the surrounding countryside, weeks later in the moonlight, pretending to be her, some of the dogs pretended I was her too, and although they knew me they barked at me. Doc Swain's great big old hound Galen nearly attacked me, and Doc Swain raised his head from the microscope and came outside and said, ”Hush, Galen! Down, you dumb bawler! Oh, it's you, Latha. What are you doin out this time o' night?”

”Jist a-playin like I was her,” I said, and he knew who I meant. ”And I was jist wonderin, did dogs bark at her that first night? Galen must've.”

”I reckon he did, but I never took no notice,” Doc Swain said.

If there was anyone who heard the village dogs barking at her and thought to go see who or what the dogs were barking at, it was probably that old lady who lived two doors down from Doc Swain, in the big fine two-story house directly across the road from Willis Ingledew's store. This house had been built way back around the time of the War Between the States by old Jacob Ingledew, who died the year before I was born. He had been the founder of Stay More, he and his brother Noah, and right after that war he had served for a time as the governor of the whole state of Arkansas. Compared with Governor Hays, who wouldn't pardon Nail Chism, he...but I'm digressing. This lady had been a friend of his wife's when they lived in Little Rock at the governor's mansion, and when Sarah Ingledew came back to Stay More she brought her friend with her, to stay. In this year of 1915 both Jacob and Sarah had been in the Stay More cemetery for going on fifteen years, but this lady, who inherited the house, still lived on there, and would continue to do so until sometime in the early twenties (I wasn't living in Stay More the year of her death, so I don't remember). To tell the honest truth, I never knew her name. Older folks who had known Sarah Ingledew just called her Sarah's Friend, and in fact that's all that you'll find on her tombstone. If she ever told Viridis her name, and she must have, it's not recorded.

But she came out on her front porch, wrapped in a thick afghan shawl, to see what the dogs were barking at...a.s.suming the dogs were barking. That porch runs the whole length of the big house, and it has fancy jigsaw Gothic bal.u.s.ters running along the edge of it, hardly more than an arm's length from the road, and the lady stood up against that porch rail and looked at that moonlit figure on horseback. Viridis stopped and turned Rosabone toward the lady and said, in that genteel Little Rock/Paris voice of hers, ”Good evening, madam. This is Stay More, is it not? I've just arrived in town, and I'd like directions for finding the Right p.r.o.ng Road that goes to the Chism farm.”

The lady smiled. ”Which part of Little Rock are you from?” she asked.

Viridis was taken aback, to put it mildly, and her first thought was of some kind of conspiracy: somebody, maybe Nail himself, had gotten word to these people that Viridis was coming. But this woman was asking her which part of Little Rock she was from, as if there were divisions or distinctions, and-Viridis could not help noticing-this woman was not asking the question in the mode of expression or voice she would expect from a native of these parts.

”Why, the central part,” Viridis answered. ”Why?”

”Louisiana Street, Center, Spring, or Broadway?” the old woman asked.